Drone trauma: violent mediation and remote warfare

Abstract

For people subject to drone war in Gaza, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, the violence and trauma inflicted by remotely piloted aerial systems such as the MQ-9 Reaper takes place at a remove from the sensors, networks, algorithms and interfaces that launch Hellfire and other missiles from the air. Brutal death and wounding bely the precision rhetoric, technocratic discourses and technoscientific imaginaries that shroud drone warfare in popular and political debate over its merits. Much has been said about the traumas of drone operators, but less about the traumas produced by drone warfare in those individuals and communities subject to it. In this short article, I pursue the question of how those traumas on the ground are bound up with the media-technological entities, processes and affects that compose the military drone apparatus: sensors, networks, algorithms, interfaces, atmospheres and missiles. My core contention is that the trauma of drone warfare is characterised by the violent mediation of drone systems, which produce an intensive relation between the not-yet of traumatic violence having commenced before it is felt and the already-too-late of that experience.