The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence

Robot Wars: US Empire and geopolitics in the robotic age

How will the robot age transform warfare? What geopolitical futures are being imagined by the US military? This article constructs a robotic futurology to examine these crucial questions. Its central concern is how robots – driven by leaps in artificial intelligence and swarming – are rewiring the spaces and logics of US empire, warfare, and geopolitics. The article begins by building a more-than-human geopolitics to de-center the role of humans in conflict and foreground a worldly understanding of robots. The article then analyzes the idea of US empire, before speculating upon how and why robots are materializing new forms of proxy war. A three-part examination of the shifting spaces of US empire then follows: (1) Swarm Wars explores the implications of miniaturized drone swarming; (2) Roboworld investigates how robots are changing US military basing strategy and producing new topological spaces of violence; and (3) The Autogenic Battle-Site reveals how autonomous robots will produce emergent, technologically event-ful sites of security and violence – revolutionizing the battlespace. The conclusion reflects on the rise of a robotic US empire and its consequences for democracy

Violent conditions: The injustices of being

Violent conditions burn in the background of daily life. Consider the slow wounds of ecological violence, the crumbling cityscapes of austerity, or the mental trauma inflicted by capitalism. In this paper, we provide an account for understanding violence in and through conditions, drawing on the work of Johan Galtung and Gilles Deleuze in particular. Violent conditions are not the property of individuals or monolithic structures: they are the existential climates by which localized subjects and worlds condense into being. In making this argument, we not only advance scholarship on the geographies of violence, but also make a sustained case for how and why condition is an important social, political, and ontological heuristic. Our examination is framed by unearthing the complex conditions and discontents of capitalism. Violent conditions forcefully constrain, traumatize, and poison the very resources of our becoming. Accordingly, we provide a map for exploring the geographies of violent conditions across four interrelated sections. (1) The Virtual, (2) Truncated Life, (3) Time, (4) Common Sense. Collectively, these explain how violence is embedded in the flesh and bones of our worlds. The paper finishes by discussing the injustices of being and the possibilities for peace

Towards an evental geography

This paper puts forward a new way of thinking about objects, worlds, and events. The philosophical contribution of the paper pivots around the idea that objects are force-full: smoldering furnaces of affects that are capable of creating, policing, and destroying the very contours of existence. The paper begins with a problem, which is how to account for objects, worlds, and events outside of human consciousness or ‘in-themselves’. It answers by constructing an ‘evental geography’ from the ontologies of Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, and Graham Harman. A ‘geo-event’ names the transformation of a world – from galaxies to nation states to ecosystems – by ‘inexistent’ objects and the forces they unleash. The paper is situated at the busy crossroads of (object-oriented) philosophy, non-representational theory, and actor-network theory