Description
Because of their supposed disruption and transgression of established configurations of military violence and gender, US and UK military drone programmes have come to be theorised as sources of critical feminist hope and alternative within international relations scholarship. In this article we characterise this as a misplaced wishful futurology, in which fantasies of radical alternative military futures obfuscate and erase the realities of liberal military violence, invest in the renewal of liberal war, and displace deeper feminist reckonings with it. Central to existing analysis is an empirical and normative investment in the apparently transgressive figure of the US or UK drone pilot conjoined with the drone itself which is understood to be a bearer of inherent technological emancipatory potential. We argue that feminist analysis of military drone programmes should recentre violence and a clearer attention to the international, both in conceptual and empirical terms. Doing so would, we suggest, necessarily entail an ethically important empirical adjustment away from the figure of the drone pilot as the referent site of globally distributed drone violence and trauma, oblige us to treat claims concerning liberal military progress and refinement with deliberate caution, and open space to question feminist stakes and investment in war.
