Holder2020

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Holder2020
BibType ARTICLE
Key Holder2020
Author(s) Alexander Holder
Title The centrality of militarised drone operators in militarised drone operations
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Military, Aircraft
Publisher
Year 2020
Language English
City
Month
Journal Ethnographic Studies
Volume
Number 17
Pages 81-99
URL Link
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.4050543
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Over the course of the last two decades, militarised drones—known alternatively as ‘remotely piloted aircraft’ (RPA) or ‘un-manned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs)—have come to be the centrepiece of the United States’ (U.S.) post-9/11 military involvements, a signature means by which operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere have been conducted. Over the course of this period, the now-retired General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and its successor the MQ-9 Reaper have come to be defined by two distinct forms of invisibility. They are invisible, in a first sense, to the populations who live below and within their telescopic gaze (See Gregory, 2011; Haraway, 1988), who can neither see the aircraft as they loiter eight thousand metres overhead, nor the pilots who fly them by remote control from half a world away; but they are also invisible, in a second sense, to the people on whose behalf the drone is supposedly deployed. This latter form of invisibility, perhaps better termed ‘in-transparency’, captures the organisational, institutional, and procedural means by which the public have been denied a view of the inner workings of the United States’ militarised drone programmes.

Notes