The urbanization of drone warfare: policing surplus populations in the dronepolis

This paper explores the urbanization of drone warfare and the securitization of the “surplus population”. Defined as a bloc of humanity rendered as structurally unnecessary to a capital-intensive economy, the surplus population is an emerging target for the post-welfare security state. If we now live in an age of a permanent conflict with uncertain geographies, then it is at least partly fueled by this endemic crisis at the heart of the capitalist world system. Of key significance is the contradictory nature of the surplus population. The “security threat” generated by replacing masses of workers with nonhumans is increasingly managed by policing humans with robots, drones, and other apparatuses. In other words, the surplus population is both the outcome and target of contemporary capitalist technics. The emerging “dronification of state violence” across a post-9∕11 battlespace has seen police drones deployed to the urban spaces of cities in Europe and North America. The drone, with its ability to swarm in the streets of densely packed urban environments, crystallizes a more intimate and invasive form of state power. The project of an atmospheric, dronified form of policing not only embodies the technologization of state security but also entrenches the logic of a permanent, urbanized manhunt. The paper concludes by discussing the rise of the dronepolis: the city of the drone

Scorched atmospheres: the violent geographies of the Vietnam war and the rise of drone warfare

This article explores the violent geographies of the Vietnam War. It argues that the conflict is crucial for understanding the security logics and spatialities of U.S. state violence in the war on terror. An overarching theme is that U.S. national security has inherited and intensified the atmospheric forms of power deployed across Southeast Asia, including ecological violence, the electronic battlefield, counterinsurgency (the Phoenix Program), and drone surveillance. All of these attempted to pacify and capture hostile circulations of life and place them within the secured and rationalized interiors of the U.S. war machine. The article thus expands on the concept of atmospheric warfare. This is defined as a biopolitical project of enclosure to surveil, secure, and destroy humans and nonhumans within a multidimensional warscape. Since modern state power is becoming ever more atmospheric—particularly with the rise of drone warfare—dissecting the origins of that violence in the Vietnam War is a vital task

Reading Ian Shaw's Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance

Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance, Ian G.R. Shaw. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2016). 336 pp £18.47 (kindle edition), £81 (hardcopy), £22.99 (Paperback) ISBN-10: 0816694745, ISBN-13: 978-0816694747

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this paper we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and 'real' politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined

Ghosts in the machine: drone warfare will haunt the future

No abstract available

Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance

Focusing on U.S. drone warfare and its broader implications as no other book has to date, Predator Empire argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive “Predator Empire.” It reveals how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose our planet in a robotic system of control

Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance

Focusing on U.S. drone warfare and its broader implications as no other book has to date, Predator Empire argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive “Predator Empire.” It reveals how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose our planet in a robotic system of control

Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism

Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in—a post-capitalist future

The state of objects

No abstract available

The mosquito’s umwelt, or one monster’s standpoint ontology

Mosquitoes are able to vector malaria and other diseases across the planet, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Not only is this a challenging management problem, we also find it to be underlined by an important philosophical problem, namely: the impossibility of controlling "life". Influential Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll wrote that every creature on Earth, from sea urchins to spiders, lives within a unique sphere of existence called an "umwelt", or "surrounding world". The umwelt defines the specificity of relations shared between an organism and its environment. Using this concept we complement existing work on monstrous natures in geography by arguing that "monstrosity" arises in the excesses and discontinuities between the mosquito’s umwelt and the human efforts that seek to eliminate it. This finding arises from fieldwork undertaken with public health and vector control officials in the U.S. state of Arizona over several years. Their focus on reducing mosquito breeding sites suggests the complex and emergent spatialities of the monstrous