Abstract
AbstractThis article addresses the problem of drone violence that is ‘grey’ in the sense of being hard to categorise. It focuses on circumstances, such as arose in Pakistan, in which a foreign government's armed drones are a constant presence. A lesson from US experience there is that the persistent threat of drone strikes is intended to suppress activities that endanger the drone-using state's security. However, this threat inevitably affects innocent people living within potential strike zones. To judge such drone use by reference to military ethics principles is to assume that ‘war’ is going on, but indefinite drone deployments are difficult to conceptualise as war, so traditional Just War thinking does not suffice as a basis for moral judgement. In assessing the US government's commitment to drone-based containment of risks emerging along its ‘terror frontier’, the article considers three alternative conceptualisations of drone violence arising in non-war contexts: vim (‘force short of war’), terrorism, and imperialism. It then rejects all three and proposes that such violence is better conceptualised as being merely ‘quasi-imperialistic’. On this basis, however, the sustaining of a drone strike campaign against a series of suspected terrorists can still be condemned as violating the right to life.
Highlights
On 20 January 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as President of the United States, the incoming national security adviser issued an order for tighter controls on counterterrorism operations outside war zones
A new administration in the White House presents an opportunity for a reset of US drone policy
In using armed drones against suspected terrorists located far away and outside war zones, the US government has struggled to claim successfully that drone strikes count as war, and it has been unwilling to accept the restrictions on violence that apply in the peacetime law enforcement paradigm
Summary
On 20 January 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as President of the United States, the incoming national security adviser issued an order for tighter controls on counterterrorism operations outside war zones (away from where there are US troops present). Where there is greater doubt about whether a specific operation counts as armed conflict, the more difficult it is to claim that killing individual terrorist suspects in this context is lawful.[20] So, to get around this difficulty while targeting suspected terrorists in signature strikes ‘outside areas of active hostilities’,21 the US government has asserted that killings do not need to be justified under human rights law as long as they represent legitimate acts of national self-defence On this basis, drone violence has been presented not as falling into a legal vacuum between the war and law enforcement paradigms (where no moral and legal basis for killing is available), but rather as an example of a third kind of legitimate state violence: ‘self-defence targeting’. Renic, ‘A gardener’s vision: UAVs and the dehumanisation of violence’, Survival, 60:6 (2018), pp. 57–72 (p. 64)
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