Imagining people,targeting phones

Abstract

This article engages with the mobile phone as a locus of military practice and resistance by examining the use of mobile phones as tactical targets in war. Our analysis adds to the International Relations (IR) and security studies literature that has investigated the mobile phone by mobilising Paul Virilio’s thinking around prosthetic technologies and obedient resistance. In this way, we offer an account of how the mobile phone enables political domination and violence, while at the same time affording creative modes of resistance. To illustrate our theorisation of the mobile phone at war, we turn to three empirical examples from the post-9/11 US drone strikes, the post-2022 war in Ukraine, and Israel’s walkie-talkie and pager attacks in Lebanon in 2024. They show how tactical targeting operates through the ontological collapsing of human and device and how the relative ‘smartness’ of the device influences levels of human/technology integration and the kind of political violence that the phone makes possible. Moreover, the illustrations demonstrate how obedient resistance may occur through three related strategies, all of which seek to partly reverse the integration of human and device: decoupling, encrypting, and unsmarting.

Keywords

Mobile phones tactical targeting Virilio prosthetic technologies resistance

Introduction

[. . .] surely we cannot fail to see that the site of cutting-edge technologies is no longer so much the territorial body, [. . .] but now well and truly man’s animal body. (Virilio, 1997: 99–100)

Resistance is always possible!. (Virilio quoted in Armitage, 2000a: 194)

This article examines how the mobile phone operates in contemporary warfare. It does so through a theoretical analysis of how mobile phones – in different ways – enable targeting through an ontological collapse of people and their devices, that is, how the phone is assumed to have become part of the human body. As mobile phone use has proliferated over the past few decades, and especially since the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the smartphone’s subsequent cultural domination, military practitioners have also widely appropriated mobile phone technology for use in battle, as we show below. To make sense of such practices, we turn to Paul Virilio’s thinking around prosthetic technologies and his notion of obedient resistance. Virilio (1995, 1997) suggests that miniaturised technologies are prosthetic because they are integrated into the human body, which leads to a technological colonisation of the human body and self, enabling those who control the technology to dominate those who do not. From this perspective, the phone’s interaction with the human body enables discrimination and violence. Hidden in Virilio’s rather deterministic techno-pessimism, however, are also possibilities for change through resistance. While dominated by prosthetic technologies, subjects can find ways to oppose the system from within; they can resist, but in order to do so, they must first obey. Hence, the phone’s interaction with the human body also enables the crafting of subversive political practices.

Importantly, though, Virilio does not offer a theory of prosthetic endo-colonisation and obedient resistance but rather delivers what we can call a speculative critique of technopolitical practices and developments. Virilio’s ideas can thus not be mapped neatly onto empirical realities or used to explain causal factors. Instead, they provide provocations to think with when exploring the role of consumer technology in contemporary security politics (see Der Derian, 1999; Lacy, 2015). As such, our analysis of the mobile phone as a prosthetic technology does not use Virilio to explain why and how this device enables practices of violence and resistance, but instead to open up new spaces for thinking critically and creatively around how the mobile phone’s concrete interaction with human security actors conditions such practices.

Mobilising Virilio’s notions of prosthetic technology and obedient resistance as theoretical thinking tools, then, we trace the evolution of mobile phones as tactical targets with three illustrations, relating to post-9/11 US-targeted killings via drones, the current war in Ukraine, and finally, Israel’s walkie-talkie and pager attacks in Lebanon in 2024. They show not only the consolidation of the phone as a locus of security practice but also how resistance to digital domination takes the shape of mundane behaviour, where digital everyday life is made more analogue. More specifically, the analysis highlights three dynamics of resistance: decoupling, encrypting, and unsmarting.

In international interventions conducted in the name of countering terrorism, US drone strikes targeted SIM cards in cell phones based on so-called pattern of life analyses, meaning strikes did not identify individuals but identified signatures of terrorist-like behaviour derived from mobile phone use. To resist signature strikes, mobile phone users decoupled by juggling many different SIM cards and leaving phones in less populated areas, which made it more difficult for drone operators to hit the ‘right’ target (Gusterson, 2019; Mazzetti, 2013; Scahill et al., 2015). In the current Ukraine war, the phone has been used for a wide range of targeting practices by the Russian military, such as disrupting infrastructure and disrupting communication by targeting mobile endpoints directly. Ukrainian people resisted this practice by using encrypted messaging apps and hence modified their phone use to make it less vulnerable to exploitation (Black, 2024; Ford, 2023; Freese, 2023; Perez, 2023). In Lebanon, in 2024, Israel targeted Hezbollah members through their pagers and walkie-talkies. These are not, of course, mobile phones, but we will show how their use is in itself an act of preemptive resistance against mobile phone targeting. The case shows how resistance through ‘going analogue’ – or unsmarting – remains digital to some extent due to the need for continued communication and thus opens up new vulnerabilities. The three cases show that targeting of and resistance through mobile phones sits on a spectrum of ‘smartness’ (from the unsmart pagers and walkie-talkies to the smartphone and via the simple cellphone in between) and, crucially, how the level of embodied connectivity (Markussen, 2022) afforded by different levels of smartness impacts the kind of violence and resistance that the phone enables.

Previous literature in security studies and International Relations (IR) about the mobile phone has focused on how the mobile phone exercises material agency to condition security practices (Chambers, 2016; Markussen, 2022, 2023; Norman et al., 2024; Ølgaard and Richey, 2024; Saugmann Andersen, 2024) and, relatedly, how the phone enables new modes of representation of and participation in war (Ford and Hoskins, 2022; Horbyk, 2022; Markussen, 2024b). We contribute to this research by examining a new practice for which the mobile phone is mobilised in war – tactical targeting – and also by offering a new theoretical perspective on how mobile phones interfere with, and influence, contemporary warfare. In particular, Virilio helps us make sense of how the mobile phone, and the different ways in which different mobile devices connect to the human body, simultaneously affords practices of violence and resistance.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we review the literature about mobile phones in security studies and IR. Second, we present Virilio’s notion of prosthetic technologies and obedient resistance in more detail. Third, we explore the Virilian understanding of the mobile phone with three empirical illustrations, which each illuminate different aspects of the mobile phone’s operation as a military device. Fourth, we analyse the empirical illustrations in light of Virilio’s thinking and discuss nuances in how the mobile phone collapses people and devices in war.

The mobile phone in security and war: a review of previous research

Studies of security and war have begun taking an interest in the mobile phone and how it enables new security practices. At first, this literature studied indirectly how the mobile phone operates as a security device, meaning it did not focus studies directly on the phone but rather on digital infrastructure and devices more generally – a landscape in which the phone is obviously important but where it was given no particularly privileged position. One notable example is Samuel Tanner and Michael Meyer’s (2015) analysis of how different digital devices – among them the mobile phone – have changed police work by offering new tools for conducting practical tasks ‘on the beat’. In a similar manner, Rune Saugmann (2020) has examined how the presence of digital video equipment – often phones – at security scenes like a protest setting conditions possible political actions and reconfigures the power dynamics between protesters and the police. Others, meanwhile, have focused on how digital platforms, applications, and connectivity in more general terms transform security practices like preventing sexual violence (Grove, 2015), crisis management (Chandler, 2018), and logistics (Iazzolino and Musa, 2024) (see also Norman, 2024; Vogel and Musamba, 2024).

More recently, as the impact of the mobile phone as a distinct security device has become more and more evident, scholars of security and war have concentrated on how the phone intervenes in and enables practices of security and how it influences practices of warfare. The security-focused research often draws inspiration from science and technology studies (STS) to investigate how the mobile phone mobilises its technological agency through interactions with humans to condition the practice of security. For instance, Peter Chambers argues that the ‘smartphone is an extremely subtle and complex device whose uses, agency, and affects depend greatly on the assemblages in which it is an actant’ (Chambers, 2016: 195). Håvard R. Markussen (2022), meanwhile, shows how the smartphone operates as a security device through appropriations of embodied connectivity and demonstrates how such appropriations enabled a spiral of surveillance and countersurveillance at the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests (see also Markussen, 2023, 2024a, 2024b).

Taking a similar approach, Saugmann Andersen (2024) understands smartphones as ‘security articulation infrastructure’ in the sense that they materially enable new ways of enunciating security claims and demonstrates how smartphones functioned in the BLM protests as ‘gateways connecting established mass media to new vernacular media’ (1471). Daniel Møller Ølgaard and Lisa Ann Richey (2024), moreover, examine the use of donor apps in humanitarian aid and argue that the smartphone interacts with humans to afford donation practices that are ‘gratifying’ for donors while functioning to perpetuate paternalistic and discriminatory aid relations. Finally, a number of scholars have examined the various ways in which the phone impacts conditions of mobility for refugees and border security more broadly. This literature tends to emphasise how the smartphone constitutes a simultaneous possibility and risk. Notably, Marie Gillespie et al. (2018) show how the phone enables ‘contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help’ but at the same time leaves refugees vulnerable to ‘exploitation and surveillance’ (see also Bolhuis and van Wijk, 2021; Josipovic, 2023, 2024; Jumbert et al., 2018; Leurs and Patterson, 2020).

The more warfare-focused research into the mobile phone as a distinct digital device has concentrated mostly on issues of representation and participation and, more specifically, how the smartphone enables new modes of knowing and being in war. Perhaps most influentially, Matthew Ford (2024: 1534) argues that the smartphone’s affordance of connectivity influences ‘how entire societies will continue to engage with war’ and how the smartphone has made war become ‘participative in ways that have serious implications for civil society, the laws of armed conflict and the future conduct of warfare’. Concretely, Ford (2024: 1534) suggests that the smartphone functions to ‘collapse distinctions between civilian and soldier, media and weapon’, as the smartphone has – through its use for practices of representation and participation – become a weapon and as the civilian through these very same practices has become a soldier (see also Ford and Hoskins, 2022). Similarly, Roman Horbyk (2022) has made the case that the smartphone’s simultaneous use for personal and military purposes hybridises ‘the military and the intimate’ and further blurs the line between war and peace. Furthermore, Markussen (2024b) analyses Ukrainian president Zelenskyy’s selfie videos in the first few days of the Ukraine war to theorise the smartphone as an inscription device, which means that the smartphone, through its intimate connection with the human body, affords new and arguably more effective modes of representing war and communicating in war.

Importantly, the mobile phone research in IR and security studies is part of a broader conversation in related fields about the political implications of the emergence of digital technologies more generally. In media studies, the increased use and indeed embodiment of mobile phones but also other wearables have, for example, been examined for how they influence political participation (Johnson et al., 2022; Martin, 2014), impact aid (Sandvik, 2020), enable political protest (Neumayer and Stald, 2014), or mediate political violence (Roitman and Yeshua-Katz, 2022). Moreover, a vast body of media studies literature also explores how social media and mobile technologies influence contemporary warfare. This research examines inter alia how social media practices impact information access and use in war, how social media channels are used by belligerents to ‘frame’ war and to craft strategic narratives (Massa and Anzera, 2023; Ptaszek et al., 2024; Tschirky and Makhortykh, 2024), and how smartphones may enable civic resilience in times of war (Zarembo et al., 2024). In surveillance studies, research on mobile technologies has focused more on issues of governance; more specifically, how wearables are mobilised by surveillance regimes to exercise political control; and, crucially, how such practices infringe on privacy rights (Green and Smith, 2002). At the same time, much of this research also addresses the role of mobile surveillance in contemporary warfare, addressing both the exploitation of mobile data for surveillance, for example, via drones (Greene, 2015) and the use of mobile devices to document war atrocities (Houge, 2023).

We add to the burgeoning literature about mobile phones as devices of security and war in IR and security studies and to broader conversations about the political impact of mobile technologies in media studies and surveillance studies, by examining the operation of one specific practice of warfare enabled by the smartphone’s intimate connection with the human body – namely, targeted bombings that rely on the ontological collapsing of body and device. To do so, we turn to Paul Virilio’s political notions of prosthetic technologies and obedient resistance. In this way, we contribute to mobile phone research in security studies and IR by exploring the phone/human connection from a new theoretical angle and, in particular, by excavating how political violence and resistance are simultaneously enabled by concrete interactions between humans and different mobile devices.

A Virilian reading of the mobile phone at war

Prosthetic endo-colonisation

In his books The Art of the Motor (1995) and Open Sky (1997), French philosopher Paul Virilio explores the idea that modern technologies increasingly function as prosthetics to the human body. Prosthetics are artificial body parts or limbs, and for Virilio, they serve as an analogy for how we humans relate to our technological devices and, indeed, how technological devices can come to invade the human body and influence the ways in which it operates. Especially, referring to the miniaturisation of technology that follows from advances in biotechnology and the invention of nanomachines, Virilio argues that technological devices increasingly become not only attached to, but also integrated in, the human body. Using the example of the pacemaker, he shows how machines are no longer mere instruments foreign to and meant to aid the human body. Instead, they are becoming constitutive parts of the body. Able to ‘reproduce and in fact supply the rhythm of life’, the pacemaker not only helps the heartbeat but also makes ‘the body throb in time to the machine’ (Virilio, 1995: 103).

Like the pacemaker, then, the mobile phone not only aids human functioning but also becomes part and parcel of that very functioning. Admittedly, Virilio had more direct implants in mind when warning about prosthetic technologies and even mentioned the mobile phone as a precursor to ‘the transplantation revolution and the ingurgitation of micromachines’ (1997: 53). However, he hardly anticipated how mobile telephony and computation would develop and arguably underestimated the extent to and intensity with which the phone would come to interact with the body. Although it is not an implant in Virilio’s strict pacemaker-sense, the mobile phone is still a highly prosthetic technology – arguably the most pervasive and intrusive we know – given its integration in the body and remaking of what it means to be human in a social context. In fact, one could argue that the transplantation revolution that Virilio warned about has not really come to pass – at least not the way he envisaged it with the normalisation of brain implants and robotised motorisation – and that the spread and sociocultural domination of the mobile phone is Virilio’s prosthetic dystopia but in a different, more subtle guise.

Importantly, Virilio (1995, 1997) insists on the connection between micro- and macrosocial endo-colonisation. Much like prosthetic technologies turn on the body to colonise it, technologised security apparatuses and surveillance regimes increasingly turn inward towards their own populations instead of external threats. As Joshua Packer and Jeremy Reeves (2020) indicate, this shift has been enabled by the emergence of global information networks and accelerated by the way in which the media – and its coconstitution with the humans who use it – ‘make it possible for this lurking insider threat to be seen, heard, studied and solved’ (2020: 7). Crucially, though, this macrosocial endo-colonisation is enabled by the prosthetic extension of the human body and degradation of the human being that characterises microsocial endo-colonisation. As Virilio (1995: 114) states in The Art of the Motor, ‘we have never, in fact, dominated geophysical expanse without controlling, increasingly tightly, the substance, the microphysical core of the subject being’. He implies, then, that the technological control over the body, which is achieved by the miniaturisation of devices and their prosthetic integration, is vital for making possible the exercise of endo-colonial political control. Making this point even more explicit, Virilio (1997: 99–100) argues in Open Sky that

surely we cannot fail to see that the site of cutting edge technologies is no longer so much the territorial body, the geographical expanse of our world proper, [. . .] but now well and truly man’s animal body, the body proper of an individual who will soon be subject to the reign of biotechnology, of nanomachines capable not only of colonizing the expanse of the world, but also the very thickness of our organisms.

In this way, Virilio previews more recent research in critical security and military studies, which highlights how the military has come to subordinate the body to a martial epistemology, meaning it takes the incorporation of human and machine for granted when crafting new military practice. Notably, Antoine Bousquet et al. (2020) argue that contemporary warfare is in part constituted by the military’s mobilisation of the human body, that is, the ways in which the body is conscripted as a resource for the military to use in war. Bousquet et al. poignantly label this process the ‘marshalling of the human body’ (106) and make the case that ‘among all the spheres of human activity, it is plausibly within that of armed conflict that the previously established limits of the body are most persistently and spectacularly breached’ (107). Analysing how embodied technologies (like the mobile phone) enable the marshalling of the human body, Kevin McSorley (2012) has examined footage from helmet cams and how it produces a regime of ‘somatic war’ that ‘foregrounds sensory emotion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability’ (see also McSorley, 2020).

Similarly, Packer and Reeves argue that various media technologies, and indeed, their logics of othering and targeting in war, have ‘crept like a virus into the human sensory apparatus’, thus leading humans to surrender a ‘crucial ethical capacity – the ability to determine who is friend and who is foe’ (3). Lucy Suchman (2015), meanwhile, invokes Donna Haraway’s figure of the Cyborg to make the case for seeing body/machine boundaries as contingent rather than fixed, and in war, ‘often strategic’ (x). In what she calls the ‘twin forms of contemporary bioconvergence’, Suchman further argues that through targeting practices where enemies are technologically ‘othered’, the bodies of operating agents are also ‘incorporated into war fighting assemblages’ (6–7). These perspectives give texture to Virilio’s speculation about the capacity of embodied technologies to colonise the very ‘thickness of our organisms’ and, through such colonisation, constitute martial epistemologies. Furthermore, they expand Virilio’s notion of prosthetics by showing how endo-colonisation that occurs through interactions between humans and miniaturised, often media technologies, can be wrapped up in military warfighting assemblages and, more specifically, governed by martial logics of operation and ways of seeing.

Central to Virilio’s (1977/2006) critique of endo-colonial domination, moreover, is his thinking around speed and its political economy, primarily developed in the book Politics and Speed and famously explained in an interview with John Armitage (2000b). For Virilio, space and time are relative to speed, meaning that speed determines how humans perceive time and space and not the other way around. As such, societal and political developments are dependent on the speed of technology and how humans perceive such developments. With the proliferation of contemporary, high-speed information technology, Virilio speculates, we are moving from living under conditions of relative speed to living under conditions of absolute speed, where the pace of acceleration is moving too quickly for human perception (Armitage, 2000b: 35–36). Under such conditions, people end up living in different temporal orders. This means that technological innovation and the acceleration of speed that this often involves create different speed classes, where those who control the technology that places humans at the mercy of absolute speed are in a position of political domination and those who are not in a position of political precarity. The simultaneous endo-colonisation of bodies and societies thus happens through a kind of techno-logistical oppression by which the few control the many through the deployment of acceleration from above (see also Bratton, 2006; Csernatoni and Martins, 2024; Der Derian, 1999; Hutchings, 2008: 138). From this perspective, we can see that the mobile phone, understood as prosthetic technology, does more than colonise the body and change what it means to be human: It is also a vehicle for political domination through speed.

Obedient resistance

Many have criticised Virilio for being overly pessimistic in his outlook on our digitised present and future and too deterministic in his understanding of technology (Csernatoni and Martins, 2024; Hutchings, 2008; Kellner, 2000; Lacy, 2015). Kimberley Hutchings (2008), for example, argues that Virilio’s pessimistic and even apocalyptic view of technology and its impact on the politics of security leaves the world ‘exhausted as a site of politics’. Similarly, Kellner accuses Virilio of pushing a misguided and dangerous technophobia that leads us to overlook the ‘empowering and democratizing aspects of new computer and media technologies’ (Kellner, 2000: 103). Implicit in such critiques is also the observation that Virilio’s philosophy leaves little room for human agency. In this way, Virilio diverges from other accounts of human/machine interactions more commonly mobilised in critical security studies (CSS), which – albeit in different ways – tend to highlight how machines develop with humans. Notably, there is a broad literature within CSS that draws primarily from actor network theory (see e.g. Bourne, 2012), but also other STS concepts like intraaction (see e.g. O’Grady, 2021), technogenesis (see e.g. Pötzsch, 2015), and coproduction (see e.g. Martins and Jumbert, 2022) to make sense of how human/machine interaction remakes rather than eliminates human agency.

Even though he centres his thoughts on endo-colonisation on the human subject by assuming the original, essential wholeness of the human body, Virilio takes the relationship between technology and the human subject to be a one-way street where technology dominates the human being and, by extension, society and politics instead of the other way around. Indeed, for Virilio, the use of high-speed information technologies for resistance is ‘unlikely to lead to the end of violence and abuses of state power’ because the technologies used for resistance can also ‘create new techniques of control’ (Lacy, 2015). From this perspective, resistance seems futile, and the political agency held by the targets of oppressive security practices appears rather hollow and pointless. Seeing the mobile phone purely as a prosthetic, endo-colonial technology thus seems limited because it underestimates the mobile phone’s capacity to also produce avenues for disruption and opposition (Krautwurst, 2007: 153).

Hidden in Virilio’s techno-pessimism, however, is a concept of resistance that can help us gain a better and fuller understanding of how the mobile phone operates as a security and military device, as it illuminates how the trajectory of endo-colonial security and warfare is determined not only by exploitative practices of domination but also by security subjects’ creative engagement with prosthetic technologies and thus, attempts at altering the conditions of their own oppression.

‘Resistance is always possible!’ – Virilio (quoted in Armitage, 2000a) emphatically states in response to a question about what might be potential strategies to resist the relentless technological advances and their endo-colonial effects. Without developing much further how exactly resistance can be conducted and what strategies it might employ, Virilio suggests that the development of strategies for resistance is reliant on the development of what he calls a technological culture. With this, he means that technological invention is happening at such a speed that society does not have time to adapt in real time. Using the Internet as an example, he argues that the hype around it spread so quickly that we could not develop the political intelligence needed to counterbalance its domination until it was too late. As such, Virilio’s call for a technological culture indicates that finding ways to resist prosthetic endo-colonisation requires that we first learn to live with the technology, come to experience how it functions oppressively, and only then discover the opportunities it offers for counteraction (Armitage, 2000a).

Implied in this is the assertion that resistance can only come from within. Since there is no conceivable outside, Virilio seems to suggest, and no perceivable situation in which political being is not animated by prosthetic technologies, resistance must mobilise current precarious predicaments and work from inside and on the frames of oppressive systems. Stating this point more clearly, Virilio argues elsewhere that in order to resist technological oppression, one must also obey it. Virilio further argues that since disinvention, that is, to roll back technological inventions, is not possible, all resistance practices can do is try to overtake oppressive technologies. This can be done through techniques of manipulation by which existing technologies are appropriated to ‘try to generate new uses, new aesthetics’ and to find ‘alternative possibilities for those technologies’ (Stelarc quoted in Zerbrugg, 2000: 189). Bousquet et al. (2020) echo and nuance this point by arguing that the technology-driven mobilisation of the body and constitution of a new martial epistemology also offers opportunities for what they call martial design, that is, the ‘concretization of war’s means’ (107), whereby not only military practitioners but also potential targets and victims can use technologies (such as the phone) to proactively misinform or misdirect antagonists. For Bousquet et al., the means by which the military can design warfare can also be used by belligerents to play tricks, lay traps, and to deceive and disguise (108; see also Bousquet, 2018).

In practical terms, resistance to digital domination thus takes the shape of mundane behaviour, often by making digital everyday life more analogue. Aside from Virilio, philosophers like Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault have also theorised everyday resistance, albeit not specifically in the context of war and in relation to miniaturised, embodied technologies. De Certeau and Foucault both highlight the mundane character of resistance and thus help us see with more clarity how resistance against the domination of embodied technologies – also in war – often occurs in subtle everyday forms. De Certeau is known for his notion of ‘tactics in daily life’ as a mode of resistance, where actors draw from practices in daily life to creatively and indeed spontaneously craft minutiae and micropolitical resistance practices. As de Certeau (1984) writes, a tactic is

always on the watch for opportunities to be seized ‘on the wing’. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’. The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. (de Certeau, 1984: xix)

Dealing more explicitly with resistance to colonisation, De Certeau further explains how

the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers’ ‘success’ in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it. The strength of their difference lay in procedures of ‘consumption’. (de Certeau, 1984: xiii)

While the case of Spanish colonisation is obviously very different from the prosthetic endo-colonisation that concerns Virilio, this passage offers illuminating insights about the necessity of obedience for resistance that Virilio wants to get at. In particular, the suggestion that procedures of consumption can be used to deflect power by the ‘other within’ is striking, since it indicates that consumer behaviour – which today is epitomised by mobile phone and, more precisely, smartphone use – can be a forceful source of subversion. In a similar fashion, Foucault’s (2009) notion of counterconduct points to the ways in which the character and conditions of governmentality are continuously negotiated by governed subjects through the ‘permanent use of tactical elements’ (215). For Foucault, concepts like revolt, dissent, misconduct, and disobedience do not capture the subtlety and relationality through which entangled subjects and authorities coconstitute structures of power and fail to fully express the role that mundane, system-interior resistance plays in such processes. Counterconduct, on the other hand, articulates the multiple ways in which resistance may confront, question, and change ‘certain dominant ways of being conducted without negating the general condition of conduction’ (Rossdale and Stierl, 2016; see also Death, 2010; Oddyseos et al., 2016). While similar to Virilio’s notion of obedient resistance and Bousquet et al.’s notion of martial design in the sense that they also highlight how resistance must come from within oppressive systems, De Certeau and Foucault also show how obedient resistance can take on a more direct and confrontative form, that is, as a kind of ‘fighting back’ that more explicitly aims at transforming – and not merely surviving in – the system it resists.

Thus, reading Virilo’s notion of obedient resistance, alongside Bousquet et al.’s concept of martial design and insights from De Certeau and Foucault about everyday tactics and counterconduct, the mobile phone can be understood as a device of domination that, despite its potential for prosthetic endo-colonisation, also offers opportunities for empowerment and emancipation. Through an acceptance of precarious situations and creative engagement with ‘what exists already’ (Chandler, 2018: 165), the phone can offer a way of resisting technological endo-colonisation through more or less subtle opposition and subversion.

The mobile phone as a tactical target: three empirical illustrations

We will now illustrate current dynamics of mobile phone use as a tactical target and the forms of resistance that were triggered by these practices. These illustrations are not meant to provide an exhaustive picture of all contemporary forms of mobile phones as security devices, but they offer important insights into how these devices have become a central locus of security thinking and acting, as well as into forms of resistance that we here conceptualise as decoupling, encrypting, and unsmarting.

Decoupling

A few years into the US-led response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, drone strikes acquired a central role in counterterrorism efforts. Until then, drones were a platform used mostly for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. When the platform was armed and adapted to carry missiles as a payload, drones became widely used by the very few countries that possessed the technology to locate and target individuals. The technology’s attributes enabled it to surveil large areas for a long time, locate predefined individuals, and target them with a missile when ‘the right moment’ came. These drone strikes opened up rich academic discussions on targeting, developing around issues such as the consequences of precision (and lack thereof); the ethical dimensions of information asymmetry, as well as the physical detachment between attacker and target; and the wide security assemblages that enabled those targeting practices (Chamayou, 2015; Gusterson, 2019; Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2025).

Around 2009 to 2012, though, a big part of these strikes carried out by the United States were not targeting specific, named individuals preselected as part of a kill list, but rather chosen out of a metadata analysis of the SIM cards on mobile phones. In concrete terms, this means that decisions on who to target with a missile were based not on the precise identification of one individual, but rather on a pattern of life analysis that used metadata from the SIM card of a person; that analysis focused on data such as geolocation, information about who the phone holder had been in contact with and when, and the duration of the phone calls. This dynamic means that the attackers were imagining people based on mobile phone data and then targeting the phone itself, assuming that the imagined, constructed person would be with their mobile phone.

This type of attack, based on mobile phone metadata, called ‘signature strikes’, was not an exceptional practice, but rather quite pervasive for a long period. In 2013, Heller claimed that ‘the vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the United States have been signature strikes’ (Heller, 2013: 89), and the same idea has been reported by the media. For example, one can read ‘The bulk of CIA’s drone strikes are signature strikes’ in The Wall Street Journal in 2011 (Entous et al., 2011), and Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic wondered ‘Does the CIA Even Know Who Its Drones Are Killing?’ (Friedersdorf, 2011). As put by De Luce and McLeary, these strikes have been carried out in ‘Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – countries where the United States is not engaged in a publicly declared war – and, unlike targeted killings against specific extremist leaders, do not require presidential approval’ (De Luce and McLeary, 2016). Intense pressure from civil society organisations – some of which presented Freedom of Information acts (FOIA) and pressed charges in court, as well as growing attention from the media – have put pressure on the then Obama administration to bring clarity about the rules by which drone strikes could occur. The work by the Bulletin of Investigative Journalism, the Long War Journal, Airwars, Drone Wars UK, Reprieve, Civilian in Conflict, and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, as well as some reporting by investigative journalists, became the main source of information about this extreme security practice. This has led to a decrease in signature strikes, but certainly not to their end.

In the context of this article, the most revealing aspect of this practice is how signature strikes focus on the SIM card as the locus of pattern of life analysis. It is important to emphasise that signature strikes rely on predetermined signatures, which are made through a long process of knowledge generation that goes beyond metadata from phones. But in many circumstances, a person’s life and the SIM card on their phone are understood by the attacker as being mutually constitutive and indistinguishable. This logic is captured by the expression data-double, which refers to a person’s digital identity constructed of ‘any digital information derived from or created by observing the activity, movements, and interactions of human subjects. The data are transmitted as information flows to different databases around the world, which are subsequently reassembled into readable, scrutinized profiles’ (Cooke, 2018: 238). As explained by Thomas N. Cooke, data-doubles ‘are purely virtual objects designed to supplant and/or supplement an individual’s biological identity’, and these profiles ‘are generated continuously through progressive surveillance conducted by governments, security regimes, corporations, international organizations, and other entities across the globe’ (Cooke, 2018: 238). Even though most of the work focused on data-doubles deals with the digital footprint left online, the metadata included on a SIM card with no connection to the Internet also creates an image of its user. In the context of this illustration, it was used as a form of signal intelligence (SIGINT), and it generates an idea about the owner of that phone, as well as of their contacts, geolocation, communications, and so on.

But a closer look into the role of phones in the wider surveillance-drone strike assemblage reveals that mobile phones operate at a much wider level, performing other tasks beyond the pattern of life analysis based on metadata. First, they enable direct surveillance through wiretapping, producing intelligence that can then lead to strikes (e.g. Gusterson, 2019 and Scahill et al., 2015). Second, they constitute geolocation identifiers of mobile phone numbers previously included on a list of suspects (e.g. Mazzetti, 2013). But, as revealed by former drone operators and confirmed in the Edward Snowden files, the National Security Agency (NSA) not only intercepts communications from mobile phone communication towers. It also ‘equips drones and other aircraft with devices known as “virtual base-tower transceivers”, creating, in effect, a fake mobile phone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without his or her knowledge’ (Scahill et al., 2015: 79), allowing US forces to ‘track the cell phone to within thirty feet of its actual location, feeding the real-time data to teams of drone operators who conduct missile strikes or facilitate night raids’ (Scahill et al., 2015: 79). As Stubblefield has argued:

Rather than identifying discrete individuals, the kill chain collects the partial traces of metadata in order to produce the actors necessary for a strike. These relations allow drones to penetrate the world directly, to work through and as instead of upon its objects. In this way, drone power shifts from the symbolic to the ontological; its operations become one of world-making. (Stubblefield, 2021: 12)

In this way, too, drone operations create a situation where ‘notions of time and space are contested, and where technological asymmetries amplify power relations’ (Martins, 2017: 38).

Signature strikes also provide important insights into how resistance to extreme technology-based security practices can occur. In this case, once the pattern of SIM card and mobile phone targeting became known, people with reasons to suspect they could be on kill lists or who were merely living in areas where these strikes were taking place began to act. Practices such as constant exchange of SIM cards, leaving SIM cards and phones in different places from where meetings were occurring, and diversion of attention through deliberately placing SIM cards and phones in nonpopulated areas, became a form of analogue resistance to digital-based violence. In the reporting from Jeremy Scahill and his team at The Intercept, some of the potential targets have ‘as many as sixteen different SIM cards associated with their identity’. In a revealing quote by a former US drone operator, cited in Scahill et al. (2015: 77) ‘They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave (. . .) ‘That’s how they confuse us”. Beyond these deceiving activities, many of the high-level operatives would go off-grid completely. Decoupling the person from the phone, be it through switching SIM cards, multiplying SIM cards, or going off-grid, is a strategy of resisting the attacker’s perceived collapse between human and phone. Decoupling acts on the assumption that data-doubles and biological individuals are not the same, an assumption that goes in the opposite direction of the human-phone collapse perception.

This act of decoupling the phone from the body aimed at countering the social attributes of the phone. In a sense, it is an act of resistance aiming at decoupling oneself from one’s data-double. This practice understands how the opponent would imagine the phone to be socially and physically embedded in the potential targeted individual and preemptively and analogically acts upon that.

The mere fact that signature strikes aiming at phone-generated data were so prevalent in recent times is analytically relevant as an instance of new mobile phone-based security practices and human/phone-interaction. Moreover, that it became less common does not mean that it is not being used today by the United States or by other actors. Many of these practices remain highly secretive, and resistance to them has come mostly through civil society, whistleblowers, and media (see Gros et al., 2017). Finally, new technological developments, including mobile phone-based surveillance, make us expect that similar practices will certainly play a role in near-future security practices.

Encrypting

Since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the conflict has gone through different phases and different dynamics. For the purposes of this article, it is worth observing that conventional, traditional military strategies and technologies (territorial invasion, large armies, ammunition-intensive battles, and usage of tanks and fighter jets) have coexisted with a high-tech dimension in which new technologies are being repurposed, developed, and employed on the go. These include the use of a high number of drones, from large military vehicles to small, repurposed commercial drones, but also the use of satellite-based communications and data-based geolocation assessments. For this reason, the war in Ukraine is also a data-driven conflict in which mobile phones play a central role (Ford, 2023, 2025).

This has led to strategic adaptation. According to Black (2024), ‘multiple Russian cyber units have shifted their sights away from strategic civilian targets toward soldiers’ computers and mobiles endpoints in order to enable tactical military objectives on Ukraine’s frontlines’. Ukraine phones are sources of geolocation data, carry information about patterns of movement, and enable communications among Ukrainian soldiers. Therefore, they emerge as tactical targets for cyber operations. Russian tactics include diverse forms of social engineering.

The Ukrainian government and military, as well as critical infrastructure, were targets of cyber-attacks at least twice in the immediate run-up to the Russian invasion in February 2022. The first time was on 13 January 2022, bringing down several government websites, and then in the morning of 24 January, 1 hour before the invasion, when the commercial satellite company Viasat was brought down. Since the invasion, mobile phones have been targeted in different ways. In December 2023, the communication giant Kyivstar, the mobile phone provider to more than half of Ukraine’s population, was put out of service, had its IT infrastructure damaged, and left more than 24 million people out of mobile phones, ‘in danger of not receiving alerts of potential Russian air assaults’ (Hunder et al., 2023). Ukrainian mobile phone messaging services have also been attacked. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has tracked UNC5812, a suspected Russian hybrid espionage and influence operation in which ‘the attackers attempt to deliver Windows and Android malware to the Ukrainian military recruits using a Telegram persona named “Civil Defense”’. (Coker, 2024). Moreover, exfiltration of Telegram and Signal communications from captured devices has also been reported (Black, 2024).

According to Kevin Freese (2023), smartphones have been playing a prominent role in the Russia–Ukraine war through four main functions: They are crowdsourcing forward observers and listening posts (namely, through the detection of incoming drones or reporting enemy positions); they are delivering the big picture (by allowing geospatial crisis monitoring, such as with the Live Universal Awareness Map (Liveuamap)); they are accelerating counter-battery fires (through an app that detects the acoustic signature created when incoming artillery guns fire, relays the information to another app that triangulates the position of the gun, and then a drone confirms and refines the location, allowing the command to then target the location with counter-battery fires); and they reveal troop assemblies (through the geolocation of the signals that mobile phones send to communication towers).

How have these practices been resisted? The most common action has been the resort to encryption, more precisely, free encrypted messaging applications (EMAs). On the first day after the invasion, the use of EMAs in Ukraine expanded massively. According to Sarah Perez, citing app store intelligence firm Apptopia, ‘end-to-end encryption messenger Signal, messaging app Telegram (. . .) and offline messengers Zello and Bridgefy’ were among the top 5 apps in Ukraine’s iOS App Store as of March 2022 (Perez, 2023). Offline maps were also widely used (idem), and the apps that provided them saw a spike in download numbers.

These actions reveal a pattern of encrypting the phone, that is, the resort to tools that hide and encrypt the information that is relayed. In the definition provided by Google Cloud, at its most basic level, ‘encryption is the process of protecting information or data by using mathematical models to scramble it in such a way that only the parties who have the key to unscramble it can access it’ (Google Cloud, 2024). Communication apps such as Signal use end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which is a ‘method of secure communication that prevents third parties from accessing data while it’s transferred from one end system or device to another’ (Lutkevich and Bacon, 2021).

Encrypting is therefore a strategy of resistance. It anticipates the adversary’s intention of targeting phones, and it constitutes a strategy to obstruct third-party access to a digital communication through mathematically created obstacles. Encryption resists the opponent’s attempt to dominate, surveil, and target, and it creates a network of information that is inaccessible to the opponent. At the time of writing (January 2026), the war in Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition without a clear pathway to peace, where the Russian side seems interested in prolonging the conflict to wear down Ukraine’s human and material resources, as well as its resolve. In this context, defined by a long-term time horizon, digital resistance is playing an increasingly relevant role. Drones controlled by smartphones, encrypted networks of citizen-based open-source intelligence (OSINT), and extensive use of smartphone-based video keeping visual records for post-war transitional justice have become defining features of the conflict and symbols of Ukrainian resistance.

Unsmarting

In September 2024, thousands of explosions occurred almost simultaneously throughout different parts of Lebanon – in street markets, in private homes, in work offices, and inside vehicles. These were not bombs or missiles arriving from the air, but rather the detonation of explosives hidden in pagers that were used by Hezbollah militants as an analogue communication device. A pager is a portable, wireless telecommunication device that receives and displays written or voice messages and was common in the 1990s before the mainstreaming of the mobile phone. The following day, hundreds of explosions of walkie-talkies killed at least 20 and injured at least 450 people. In total, these two combined attacks resulted in at least 32 people killed and thousands injured (Associated Press, 2024). Whereas the pagers and walkie-talkies belonged to Hezbollah operatives, their uncontrolled and simultaneous explosions throughout Lebanon have caused civilian deaths and have been described as a war crime carried out by Israel due to the indiscriminate nature of the casualties.

Investigative reporting in the days that followed the explosions revealed that this attack had been many months in the making, with Israeli secret agents creating a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer from which Hezbollah bought the devices (Frenkel et al., 2024). Media commentators around the world praised the sophistication of the operation, confirming that ingenious, tech-based attacks capture the imagination of many observers and put legal and human rights considerations on a secondary level. This attack was part of Israel’s wide regional response to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel: In the 2 years that followed, Israel conducted military operations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar, as well as a genocide in Gaza. But both the Israel–Hezbollah confrontation and the use of sophisticated, tech-based attacks carried out by Israel predate the recent escalation (Bergman, 2018).

Years before this attack, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had identified mobile phone use as a high security risk. Cited in Frenkel et al. (2024), Nasrallah told his followers in a publicly televised address ‘You ask me where is the agent, [. . .] I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent’. [. . .] ‘Bury it’. ‘Put it in an iron box and lock it’. For this reason, Hezbollah followed a strategy of obedient resistance, which can be called ‘If they go high-tech, we go low-tech’. Hezbollah operatives replaced mobile phone use with more archaic forms of communication, resorting to pagers and walkie-talkies. Israel’s use of state-of-the-art technology to surveil and target Palestinians and other regional adversaries has been thoroughly covered in the literature (Polin and Ehrman, 2018; Sa’di, 2021; Zureik et al., 2011) that has identified Palestine as a laboratory for testing and improving military technologies (Loewenstein, 2024), which then acquire increased market value for being ‘combat-proven’. Over the years, this use of cutting-edge technology has triggered different forms of responses and resistance, and Hezbollah’s unsmarting of their means of communication is an instance of that.

Whereas in the previous two illustrations, the smartness of the phone was crucial for the tactical options made by the attacker, the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon represent a relevant departure from this. It is so because these devices are not connected to the Internet and use more archaic forms of technology that do not provide the data necessary for pattern of life analysis, geolocation, and malware infiltration. Indeed, in today’s data-driven conflicts, these rudimentary forms of communication through unsmarting the phone were a preemptive form of resistance.

Eventually, the fact that these forms of communication, albeit archaic, were still targeted seems to be a validation of the prosthetic nature of the phone, assumed to be collapsed with the human body, becoming a part of it. At the same time, this requires some nuancing. Reporting from the aftermath of the explosions revealed that not only were many bypassers injured or killed but also other family members of Hezbollah operatives, who carried the devices at the time of the explosions. In concrete terms, then, we can conclude that the attacker assumed the prosthetic nature of the phone as a part of their targets’ bodies but, in reality, that was not necessarily true in all cases.

Discussion

The three empirical illustrations all cast light on how the mobile phone, as our Virilian reading above indicates, draws its political power from the capacity to simultaneously endo-colonise the human body and society. Indeed, Virilio argues that it is precisely through the endo-colonisation of the human body that miniature, prosthetic technologies like the mobile phone also endo-colonises society; that is, it turns inward and corrupts the organism of which it has become part. When mobile phones work as tactical targets in war, be that for signature strikes or for cyberattacks, it is their integration in the human body and reconfiguration of the human’s corporeal functionality which enables new modes of technological warfare.

Importantly, moreover, the exercise of political domination through mobile phones is enabled by the production of different speed classes. Recall how Virilio contends that people live in different temporal orders according to their perception of and control over technological accelerations. In the illustrations above, we see how the mobile phone places consumers of telecommunication technology in one class and those who appropriate the phone for military practice in another. Mobile phone users in, say, the Ukraine war would not have been able to comprehend the mode and scale of cyber-attacks that their consumer use of the mobile phone enabled. Nor would they have been able to do much about it, given their absolute dependence on mobile phone technology to navigate everyday life.

By illuminating different aspects of how the mobile phone is used for tactical targeting, the illustrations also give further depth to Virilio’s thinking around prosthetic endo-colonisation. Specifically, they show that domination through control over prosthetic technologies takes different forms depending on whether the phone used for targeting is ‘dumb’ or ‘smart’, i.e., whether it is a basic mobile phone or one with multi-functional internet connection . In the case of signature strikes, basic mobile phones enabled targeting of individuals through the identification of SIM cards, which ‘hopefully’ sat in the pocket or rested in the hand of an unidentified terrorist. In the case of cyber-attacks in the Ukraine war, meanwhile, smartphones enabled more advanced targeting, which made it possible for Russian cyber operations to disrupt personal communication, as well as infrastructures. Finally, in the case of the Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, prosthetic technologies even more analogue than the basic mobile phone enabled targeting of collectively identified enemies. Intriguingly, the cases also indicate that not only human bodies and societies but also prosthetic technologies can be endo-colonised. Through the instalment of malware in smartphones and the insertion of explosives in pagers and walkie-talkies, these technologies themselves were also corrupted and transformed by foreign implants.

On the one hand, the illustrations may indicate that it is not the smartness of phones per se that enables targeting, but rather their capacity to connect with the body to such an extent that potential targets carry the phone with them at all times. A case can be made that the basic mobile phone also crosses the threshold for necessary connection and integration to make effective military mobilisation of prosthetic technologies possible. From this perspective, we can argue that the role of the smartphone is at times a tad exaggerated in the literature about security and military devices. For instance, Saugmann Andersen’s (2024) conceptualisation of the smartphone as an articulation infrastructure through video and connectivity or Ford’s (2024) argument that the smartphone’s connective features turn the phone into a weapon and a civilian into a soldier, emphasise the phone’s smartness, that is, its always-on connection and multifunctionality. Our analysis instead may seem to suggest that when used for various purposes of tactical targeting, it is not the phone’s smartness per se, but rather its proximity to and integration in the body, which makes it useful for military applications.

On the other hand, and more compellingly in our opinion, the illustrations also show that smart and basic mobile phones enable different kinds of targeting through the way in which they are integrated in the human body, and hence it is important to still highlight how specific kinds of prosthetic technologies enable endo-colonisation differently. Tellingly, cyberattacks targeting Ukrainian phones and communication infrastructure would not have been possible without the connectivity provided by smartphones. Moreover, signature strikes which targeted SIM cards based on patterns of life analysis but ended up killing innocent civilians because they had ‘terrorist-like’ behavioural patterns, or because they borrowed someone else’s phone, would have been far less likely if people were using smartphones whose connection to the body and self is much stronger and more personalised. Rather than countering previous research emphasising the smartness of the phone, then, we add nuance to this literature’s understanding of the mobile phone at work in security and war. Showing how the appropriation of basic mobile phones’ and even pagers and walkie-talkies’ integration in the human body enables violent military practice, we suggest that there are other ways than through always-on connectivity that consumer devices can be potent weapons. At the same time, and in keeping with smartphone research in security studies, our illustrations demonstrate that smartphone connectivity enforces stronger human/device integration, which allows for more comprehensive and societally disruptive attacks.

Furthermore, the three illustrations also highlight Virilio’s point that resistance against prosthetic endo-colonisation must be obedient, that is, occur with and through a countermobilisation of prosthetic technologies. The realisation that resistance must be obedient stems from the integrative nature of prosthetic technologies, and relatedly, the impossibility of completely breaking free from the domination exercised through the control of these technologies. In two of the cases – signature strikes and cyber-attacks – people resist the mobile phone-enabled endo-colonisation by modifying their use of the phone, rather than stopping using it. In the third case – the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies – people resisted mobile phone-enabled endo-colonisation by stopping using the phone, but were still reliant on prosthetic communication technologies, and thus remained vulnerable to targeting through digital devices even in abstention.

Whether decoupling to make drone operations more difficult, encrypting to restrict cyber operations’ data access, or unsmarting to hide from surveillance, then, the practices of resistance highlighted above all need to communicate and stay connected, and to some extent still rely on digital, prosthetic technologies. It was this need to communicate and stay connected that was exploited by adversaries and mobilised for tactical targeting. The illustrations thus suggest that regardless of the level of smartness held by prosthetic technologies, they operate as sites for the negotiation of a spiral of surveillance and countersurveillance. Especially the case of the pager-attacks shows how the intelligence community responds to resistance practices in order to find new ways of targeting.

It is interesting to note, though, that in all three illustrations, resistance against endo-colonisation came through dedigitalisation of the phone, that is, of making the technology less prosthetic. In this way, they show how resistance grew from the correct realisation that political violence exercised through the appropriation of the mobile phone occurred through a mobilisation of embodied connectivity. Most telling of this is Hassan Nasrallah’s encouragement to Hezbollah members to get rid of their mobile phones, since it reveals knowledge about the potential for military appropriation that lies in continued connection. This is striking because resistance against the appropriation of smartphones for security purposes can also take the form of active mobilisation of the phone’s connective features, for example, for purposes of live documentation of police violence (Markussen, 2022; Saugmann Andersen, 2024), to organise political movements (Chandler, 2018), or to administer humanitarian aid (Ølgaard and Richey, 2024). Hence, resisting by reversing human/technology integration is not the only way of resisting the appropriation of mobile phones for military or security purposes. In cases when mobile phones are used for tactical targeting in war, however, and thus become a matter of life and death – like our three illustrations show – reversing integration seems a more prevalent and promising mode of obedient resistance.

Taken together, the illustrations also indicate that the tactic of reversing integration as a mode of obedient resistance also operates after different logics, depending on whether it aims to decouple, encrypt, or unsmart the mobile phone. More specifically, the three strategies of resistance showcased by the three illustrations indicate that different ways of dedigitalising prosthetic technologies sit on a spectrum that travels from still being connected (encrypting) to limiting connection to a bare minimum (unsmarting). This is an important observation because it shows that there is great nuance to resistance strategies that aim to combat prosthetic endo-colonisation, and because it suggests that the obedience required to effectively resist prosthetic endo-colonisation does not have to entail continued use of smart technologies; it can also occur through failed attempts at complete dedigitalisation. The case of Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies and pagers is most instructive here, since it shows how even the quite radical resistance strategy of getting rid of mobile phones depended on some level of integration with digital communication technologies and hence, how it has become nearly impossible to go completely ‘off-grid’. In a sense, this means that keeping a distinction between data-doubles and biological individuals is becoming dangerously difficult.

Conclusion

Mobile phones are a ubiquitous communication technology that has fundamentally transformed society over the last few decades. But how has it impacted the conduct of violence in conflict scenarios? In this article, we approached the use of mobile phones as devices of security and war by analysing the operational and political implications of one specific practice of warfare enabled by the mobile phone’s intimate connection with the human body, namely, targeted bombings that assume the ontological collapse of body and device to conduct our analysis, we relied on Paul Virilio’s ideas about endo-colonisation through prosthetic technologies.

Virilio’s work develops the argument that miniaturised technologies (such as pacemakers) are like a prosthesis because they are integrated into the human body. This prosthetic nature of some technologies leads to a technological colonisation of the human body, enabling those who control the technology to dominate those who do not. While Virilio had more direct implants in mind when warning about prosthetic technologies, our research shows that, as the mobile phone became so prevalent in society and in most people’s everyday lives, it was assumed to have become an integral part of the human body, triggering the imagination of military, intelligence, and security operatives who saw warfare potential in it. The article shows how the tactical targeting of mobile phones operates through the ontological collapsing of humans and devices. More precisely, as we show above, this collapsing is assumed by the attacker but not internalised by the targeted people. It is this non-internalisation that enables the strategy of resistance operated in the case study of decoupling. The article also shows how the level of ‘smartness’ of the device influences levels of human/technology integration. In other words, where the phone sits on the spectrum of smartness (from pagers and walkie-talkies to basic mobile phones all the way to state-of-the-art smartphones) impacts the type of political violence that the phone makes possible.

The empirical illustrations also shed light on different forms of resistance adopted by the potential targets of future attacks, who understood that their phones are a target, and often the target. Drawing on Virilio, but also De Certeau and Foucault, we understand these measures as a form of obedient resistance, that is, resistance through and within the technical and social attributes of the technology. Indeed, all strategies identified (decoupling, encrypting, unsmarting) counter the key technological attributes of the phone to enable continuous communication despite the potential threat. Our article shows how Virilio’s work can bring important insights into themes related to digital technology’s presence in society, and this serves as a reminder of how this work could receive more attention from the IR literature in this time of accelerated technological transformation.

Our Virilian analysis of the mobile phone as a security and military device, thus, not only adds to the burgeoning literature about mobile phones in security studies but also opens up wider questions relevant to important debates shaping contemporary IR. The strategies of resistance revealed here bring important insights into recent debates on resistance and contestation in international politics (Huysmans and Nogueira, 2024; Lilja, 2022), showing that the prosthetic logic, put at the service of targeting practices, builds on logics of precision that the reality sometimes contradicts. Indeed, our illustrations from signature strikes and the pager and walkie-talkie attacks show that there were multiple civilian casualties out of these actions. While the attacker assumed the prosthetic nature of the phone as a part of their targets’ bodies, the reality was significantly more blurred and nuanced than that assumption.

The nature of the mobile phone as a security device changed with the expansion of its technological attributes. Its evolution from a target of surveillance and wiretapping, passing through a destination of malware use, and ending as a targeting device aiming at killing humans (specific or imagined) illustrates how growing levels of digitalisation and connectivity open up new vulnerabilities. This is not exclusive to mobile phones. As it applies to other technologies in society, the findings in our article offer possible ways of anticipating the targeting of mundane technologies and how to resist them.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Håvard Rustad Markussen

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Bruno Oliveira Martins’ research for this article was partially supported by the RegulAIR project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, grant agreement 314615.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Håvard Rustad Markussen is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic institute for studies in innovation, research and education (NIFU). His work focuses on commercial technologies’ impact on international security. Markussen’s research appears in Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, European Journal of International Security and Critical Studies on Security.

Bruno Oliveira Martins is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where he co-leads the Security & Technology Research Group. He’s also editor-in-chief of Security Dialogue. His work focuses on issues at the intersection between technological developments, security practices, and societal change. His research has been published in journals such as Geopolitics, Journal of Common Market Studies, Big Data & Society, Science as Culture, Contemporary Security Policy, International Studies Perspectives, and European Security, among others.

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