"This changes things": Children, targeting, and the making of precision.

J Marshall Beier

doi:10.1177/00108367211050274

Abstract

Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process. In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how, when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision.

Highlights

Eye in the Sky, a 2015 film from director Gavin Hood in which a drone strike on suspected members of the al-Shabaab militant group is hampered by the presence of a young girl within the projected kill zone, offers an instructive glimpse into the constitutive social terrains on which seemingly objective properties of some of the world’s most advanced weapons systems are at least partially founded
Tension builds as a 9-year-old Alia Mo’Allim unwittingly moves in and out of harm’s way while the intended targets are seen fitting two would-be suicide bombers with explosive vests and readying them to carry out a presumably immanent attack. Desperate to strike their targets from a watchful MQ-9 Reaper drone loitering in the sky above, British military officers struggle to attain an assessment of the risk to Alia low enough to satisfy political masters whose authorization is needed in order to proceed
I draw on insights from the sociology of childhood in arguing that the very ascription of “child” is a terrain of engagement whose outcome bears directly on the constitution of precision as a social “fact” requisite to the perceived legitimacy of recourse to political violence

Summary

Introduction

Eye in the Sky, a 2015 film from director Gavin Hood in which a drone strike on suspected members of the al-Shabaab militant group is hampered by the presence of a young girl within the projected kill zone, offers an instructive (if incidental) glimpse into the constitutive social terrains on which seemingly objective properties of some of the world’s most advanced weapons systems are at least partially founded. William Walters (2014) places these developments in the same cultural context, with broad acceptance of the idea that drones are precision strike capable that has, like the popular reception given Tomahawk cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs of the 1990s, had the corollary effect of producing an expectation of meaningful discrimination, setting a high standard for legitimacy that does not abide the incidental killing of recognized noncombatants.

Results

Conclusion