Digitising the Virtual: Movement and Relations in Drone Warfare

Abstract

This article offers a relational analysis of the use of armed drones in the ‘war on terror’. Drawing from Erin Manning’s writings on movement, relations, and the posthuman, I explore how bodies and spaces are read as digitised data in the processes of the drone assemblage, reducing movement to displacement and undoing relations of becoming. The drone’s violence lies in its crippling of bodies’ capacity to respond to their immediate environments and relations. The point of departure for this article is the concept of the ‘virtual’ as drawn out by Manning: the indeterminate potential of movement which moves bodies and relations. My analysis revisits the transcripts of Uruzgan drone attack in Afghanistan in 2010, a case that has been extensively studied in the critical literature on drones to offer conceptions of what it means for the drone to be a posthuman entity. Instead of situating the drone as a posthuman object, I examine it from a posthuman methodology where the focus is on relations, rather than determinate actors or outcomes. My intervention here is twofold: to propose a framework for understanding the drone’s violence in its processes of disrupting and undoing relations, and relatedly to argue for the methodological and theoretical value of the posthuman. Numériser le virtuel: Mouvement et relations dans la guerre des drones