Abstract
AbstractSwarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.
Highlights
The atmosphere has figured centrally in the grand story of human being
As Alex Jeffrey et al (2012:1248) ask, “a driving question relates to how different materialities and technologies enter into the constitution of enclosure?” How, is the drone productive of new regimes of enclosure?
Each section is animated by empirics, the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical argument for understanding the atmospheric enclosures of our airport earth
Summary
The atmosphere has figured centrally in the grand story of human being. From ancient gods to mythical cosmologies, the sky has been a canvas for wonder and fear (see Figure 1). The paper is structured into the following sections: (1) “The geographies of enclosure” introduces existing geographic scholarship on enclosure; (2) “Ground zero” revisits the history of English enclosure to examine the historical battlegrounds where human beings were forcibly dragged inside the world interior of capital; (3) “The reenchantment of the atmosphere” explores how the biopolitical climate of an atmosphere condenses the subjective, the material, and the political in volumes of shifting cohabitation; (4) “Atmo-Economica” details the political economy and legal regimes of atmospheres; (5) “Battlesphere” looks at the violent logics of militarized atmospheres; (6) “Urban battlespheres” extends this concept to examine how urban (in)security is being transformed by drones; (7) “Immunizing the atmosphere” concludes the paper with a broader reflection on how the atmosphere has become a medium of capital and state security. Each section is animated by empirics, the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical argument for understanding the atmospheric enclosures of our airport earth
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call