Description
Existing work on the second decade of the Global War on Terror (GWoT) has focused predominantly on the politics of the drone. As this article contends, however, the United States’ targeted killing programme is better understood as fitting within a hunting security logic or social imaginary. Building on existing work, but with greater attention to longer-standing and wider cultural histories and set of practices of ‘hunting’ in US security discourses (from Indian and witch hunting to slave and communist hunting), this paper makes two interconnected arguments: First, that hunting is built on a number of intertexts that are gendered, raced, and sexed that continue to govern its subject positions, landscapes, practices, and narrative structure. Second, hunting relies and reproduces secrecy as it draws on these intertexts. Recent scholarship within critical international relations and security studies has invited a reconsideration of the power of secrecy as knowledge (un)making. Hunting helps to make this power of secrecy more evident. Drawing these two points together and using Juliet Singh (2018) postcolonial reading of the concept of ‘mastery’, this article therefore argues that hunting is a neocolonial security logic that requires mastery of the domain of secrecy. Analysing key texts associated with US manhunts in the Global War on Terror – including memoirs, official documents, speeches, and media reports – and with reference to historical studies of hunting as a US cultural practice, this article therefore lays out hunting as a security logic and security imaginary of greater significance then currently recognised within security studies.
