Making Drone Violence Strategic: A Conceptual Genealogy of Remote Warfare

This thesis studies the development of the contemporary employment of armed drones within a conceptual genealogy of aerial and remote warfare. While significant attention has been devoted either to the novelty of drone warfare, or to its political, legal, and ethical underpinnings, I situate the use of drones within a lineage of thinking about the strategic purpose of aerial and remote violence in the twentieth century. Through this process, I provide a nuanced account of how armed drones continue and change practices of aerial and remote warfare and situate their employment within broader practices of historical and contemporary warfare. This thesis analyses three central moments in the development of concepts of remote warfare which contribute to the contemporary conceptual architecture of drone employment, namely the development of strategic bombing doctrines, planning for nuclear warfare during the Cold War, and practices of aerial warfare in the Vietnam War. Subsequently, I situate the employment of American armed drones in the counterinsurgency strategy employed from 2007 to 2011 in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror more broadly. Throughout, I offer three principal contributions to scholarship on armed drones and remote warfare. First, I argue that the remoteness of armed drones is actively produced through a number of tactical, strategic, and political decisions and practices. Drawing on concepts of risk-transfer, vicarious, and surrogate warfare, I argue armed drones engage in warfare by manipulating and constructing remoteness. Second, I argue armed drones are part of a long legacy of contestations and marginalisations of concepts of war and that these contestations shape the employment of armed drones in contemporary warfare. Finally, I argue armed drones must be evaluated chiefly in their strategic contribution to contemporary warfare, and thereby reject the exceptionalisation of drone warfare as a fundamentally distinct practice of war

Drone imagery in Islamic State propaganda: flying like a state

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the Islamic State's use of images taken by drones, drawing on a dataset of ISIS propaganda images from October 2016 to December 2018. Analysing the three principal uses of drone imagery by ISIS—images of drone strikes, images of other attacks and observation—we argue that ISIS's use of drones distinguishes itself from other state and non-state uses of drones primarily by its communicative and symbolic value. While ISIS’ use of drone strikes takes place in a tactical rather than strategic setting, its employment of drones to film VBIED attacks allows them to achieve a strategic effect. After outlining ISIS’ use of drones for combat air support and to film ground (particularly VBIED) attacks, we argue, drawing on political geography, that ISIS employs drones in propaganda to stake and reinforce a claim to sovereign control of territory, performed through the flying of aircraft. The use of drone imagery, we argue, taps into long-standing visual and discursive strategies which associate vertical hierarchy and flying with mastery and control, allowing ISIS to display attributes of aerial sovereignty. This article, through an analysis of ISIS drone propaganda, provides a rare insight into non-state actors’ perception of drones and the communicative value of drone images, in addition to suggesting further avenues for the incorporation of political–geographical studies of verticality into the study of political violence and rhetoric

The Soldiers of Odin in Canada: The failure of a transnational ideology

This chapter examines the ideology and organization of the Soldiers of Odin in Canada, as well as the causes of the separation of the Canadian Soldiers of Odin from the Finnish leadership of the movement in April 2017, along with its aftermath. The chapter demonstrates the existence of a major tension within the group between Canadian ethnonationalism and an ideology of transnational, civilizational struggle, which manifests itself in the choice of tactics and the group’s rhetoric. This ideological division and the subsequent separation between the Canadian and Finnish groups demonstrate the incapacity of the Soldiers of Odin to mobilize on the basis of a transnational connection, rather than indicating a rejection of vigilantism as a method. The final section of the chapter surveys the activities of Soldiers of Odin members after the Canada-Finland separation, and suggests that several members transferred to other far-right groups with more local preoccupations

Mapping Transnational Extremist Networks: An Exploratory Study of the Soldiers of Odin’s Facebook Network, Using Integrated Social Network Analysis

This article argues that social network analyses of the online communications and structures of right-wing extremist groups can allow researchers to obtain otherwise hard-to-get insights into the ideology, rhetoric, and behaviour of groups. This is illustrated through a study of Facebook-based relations between members of the Soldiers of Odin in Canada, Finland, and Sweden in early 2017. The authors argue that these communications demonstrate the presence of close coordination between the Canadian and Finnish branches of the Soldiers of Odin, suggesting ideological conformity. The authors further demonstrate the presence of a pre-existing divide between the Québec and rest of Canada chapters of the Soldiers of Odin, which contributes to explaining the April-May 2017 schism of the movement. The authors conclude by advocating increased attention to online networks for the study of extremist groups

Existence and political order : Carl Schmitt's concept of enmity

This thesis provides a comprehensive study of the development of the concept of enmity in the thought of Carl Schmitt. I argue that the concept of enmity provides the foundation upon which all of Schmitt's writings on international theory build. By attending to the concept of enmity, it is therefore possible to clarify Schmitt's understanding of international order, of war and peace, and of political existence. Additionally, I seek to demonstrate in this thesis the consistency of Schmitt's thought throughout his career, as well as the necessity of understanding his political theory through his historical context. The first part of this thesis examines the foundations of Schmitt's concept of the political, and argues that the link of the political to order follows naturally from the ontological assumption of a plural world and of a potentially violent human nature. Additionally, it argues that political enmity therefore must bear a relation to order, thereby excluding absolute enmity from the domain of the political. An examination of total war follows, arguing that Schmitt associates the political with defensive total war, against the danger of offensive total war. The latter part of this thesis turns to Schmitt's historical discussion of enmity. First, it is argued that the bracketing of war and enmity in the jus publicum Europaeum relied necessarily on the externalisation of European enmity into a distinct, free space, namely the Americas and Africa. Second, I demonstrate that changes in the form of enmity brought about by European, colonial, and global transformations caused the collapse of the jus publicum Europaeum. I conclude this thesis by arguing for an interest in conceptions of global peace respecting the dynamic character of the political rather than seeking to depoliticise global order

Targeted Killing, Technologies of Violence, and Society

This article addresses the interaction between policies of targeted killing and wider social forces, particularly technology, through three recently published books. I suggest that while Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire does well to draw attention to the enclosing tendency of contemporary nonhuman environments and means of technological control – particularly drones, Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing provides a necessary contextualisation of these technological transformations by emphasising the cultural-political underpinnings of policies of targeted killing and of the assemblage of technologies into such policies. These perspectives are replicated in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, which describes the political and strategic manipulation of space to implement Israeli nonterritorial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I conclude by suggesting that these three works provide renewed avenues to reflect on the normative and conceptual impacts of lethal drones and other novel warfighting technologies, as well as on the relation between state violence and normalcy