Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age

Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age
Author: Marouf Hasian
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817318925

Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age posits a framework for the scholarly community, policy makers, and lay readers for understanding the legal and military aspects of drone warfare.

Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare

Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare
Author: Michael Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1315473437

Over the last decade, the U.S., UK Israel and other states have begun to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for military operations and for targeted killings in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Worldwide, over 80 governments are developing their own drone programs, and even non-state actors such as the Islamic State have begun to experiment with drones. The speed of technological change and adaptation with drones is so rapid that it is outpacing the legal and ethical frameworks which govern the use of force. This volume brings together experts in law, ethics and political science to address how drone technology is slowly changing the rules and norms surrounding the use of force and enabling new, sometimes unprecedented, actions by states. It addresses some of the most crucial questions in the debate over drones today. Are drones a revolutionary form of technology that will transform warfare or is their effect merely hype? Can drone use on the battlefield be made wholly consistent with international law? How does drone technology begin to shift the norms governing the use of force? What new legal and ethical problems are presented by targeted killings outside of declared war zones? Should drones be considered a humane form of warfare? Finally, is it possible that drones could be a force for good in humanitarian disasters and peacekeeping missions in the near future? This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

The Future of US Warfare

The Future of US Warfare
Author: Scott N. Romaniuk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2017-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317030990

This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the future of US warfare, including its military practices and the domestic and global challenges it faces. The need to undertake a comprehensive analysis about the future of warfare for the US is more pressing today than ever before. New technologies and adversaries, both old and new, have the potential to revolutionize how wars are fought, and it is imperative that policy makers, military planners, and scholars engage with the latest analyses regarding these new threats and weapon systems. The primary aim of this book is to provide a clear and comprehensive depiction of the types of conflict that the United States is likely to become involved with in the future, as well as the methods of warfare that it may employ within these struggles. While a number of scholarly books have previously considered some of the potential features of US warfare in the future, many of these writings are either outdated or have limited their focus to just one or two of the main types of warfare that may occur and omitted consideration of the others. This book intends to remedy this deficiency in the literature. The volume consists of thematic chapters which address the key issues relevant to the future of US warfare, including cyber warfare, asymmetric conflicts, drone warfare, and nuclear strategy. Through the provision of a series of analyses by leading international academics, the volume provides an important interdisciplinary examination of the different areas of warfare that the United States is expected to use or encounter in the future. This book will be of great interest to students of US foreign policy, military studies, strategic studies and International Relations in general.

Gender and Drone Warfare

Gender and Drone Warfare
Author: Lindsay Clark
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-06-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429017421

This book investigates how drone warfare is deeply gendered and how this can be explored through the methodological framework of ‘Haunting’. Utilising original interview data from British Reaper drone crews, the book analyses the way killing by drones complicates traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity in warfare. As their role does not include physical risk, drone crews have been critiqued for failing to meet the masculine requirements necessary to be considered ‘warriors’ and have been derided for feminising war. However, this book argues that drone warfare, and the experiences of the crews, exceeds the traditional masculine/feminine binary and suggests a new approach to explore this issue. The framework of Haunting presented here draws on the insights of Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, and others to highlight four key themes – complex personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, disturbed temporality and power – as frames through which the intersection of gender and drone warfare can be examined. This book argues that Haunting provides a framework for both revealing and destabilising gendered binaries of use for feminist security studies and International Relations scholars, as well as shedding light on British drone warfare. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, sociology, war studies, and critical security studies.

Narratives of the War on Terror

Narratives of the War on Terror
Author: Michael C. Frank
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000073750

Challenging the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, this volume brings together essays on a wide array of literary, filmic and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror, and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus and Kenya, the book captures the multiple transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism and insurgency. These include, but are not restricted to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles. The essays featured in this volume draw upon, and critically engage with, the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereon, while responding to postcolonial theory’s call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Cases in U.S. National Security

Cases in U.S. National Security
Author: Donald M. Snow
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538115670

Modeled after his successful Cases in International Relations, now in its seventh edition, revered author and scholar, Don Snow, presents an engaging and novel approach to national security. A series of brief case studies representing current and controversial policy problems facilitates deliberation and debate about competing policy ideas, and encourages undergraduate students to think critically about issues of national security. Cases include new strategies for containing the terrorist threat, implications of President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Agreement, and the increasingly adversarial relations with Russia, focusing on Russian expansionism in its geographical domain and interference in the 2016 American presidential election as national security problems for America.

Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media

Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media
Author: Stuart Marshall Bender
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2017-08-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319644599

This book undertakes a concentrated study of the impact of degraded and low-quality imagery in contemporary cinema and real-world portrayals of violence. Through a series of case studies, the book explores examples of corrupted digital imagery that range from mainstream cinema portrayals of drone warfare and infantry killing, through to real-world recordings of terrorist attacks and executions, as well as perpetrator-created murder videos live-streamed on the internet. Despite post-modernist concerns of cultural inurement during the seminal period of digitalized and virtualized killing in the 1990s, real-world reactions to violent media indicate that our culture is anything but desensitized to these media depictions. Against such a background, this book is a concentrated study of how these images are created and circulated in the contemporary media landscape and how the effect and affect of violent material is impacted by the low-resolution aesthetic.

Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism

Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism
Author: Ian E. J. Hill
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271082763

Technē’s Paradox—a frequent theme in science fiction—is the commonplace belief that technology has both the potential to annihilate humanity and to preserve it. Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism looks at how this paradox applies to some of the most dangerous of technologies: population bombs, dynamite bombs, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and improvised explosive devices. Hill’s study analyzes the rhetoric used to promote such weapons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining Thomas R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, the courtroom address of accused Haymarket bomber August Spies, the army textbook Chemical Warfare by Major General Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, the life and letters of Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard, and the writings of Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, Hill shows how contemporary societies are equipped with abundant rhetorical means to describe and debate the extreme capacities of weapons to both destroy and protect. The book takes a middle-way approach between language and materialism that combines traditional rhetorical criticism of texts with analyses of the persuasive force of weapons themselves, as objects, irrespective of human intervention. Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism is the first study of its kind, revealing how the combination of weapons and rhetoric facilitated the magnitude of killing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and illuminating how humanity understands and acts upon its propensity for violence. This book will be invaluable for scholars of rhetoric, scholars of science and technology, and the study of warfare.