Description
This paper explores the concept and morality of drone violence as an instrument of quasi-imperialism. It focuses on circumstances, such as arose in Pakistan, in which armed drones controlled remotely by a foreign government (in cooperation with local authorities) are a constant presence. The persistent threat of drone strikes, seemingly realisable at any time, is apparently intended to suppress activities that threaten the drone-using state’s security. However, this inevitably also adversely affects innocent people living within potential strike zones. To justify or condemn such use of drones by reference to military ethics principles is to assume that drone ‘warfare’ is going on. But if the indefinite deployment of these aircraft is difficult to conceptualise as war, Just War reasoning alone might not suffice as a moral basis for permitting or restraining violence. An alternative is to conceptualise and judge a state’s drone violence (wielded extraterritorially) as a quasi-imperialistic form of aerial policing. Accordingly, the paper assesses the US government’s commitment to drone-based containment of security risks emerging along its global ‘terror frontier’. Here, sustained drone violence against a series of suspected terrorists arguably amounts to indiscriminate oppression, and neither military nor law-enforcement ethics affords a strong basis for its legitimisation.
