Death by Double-Tap: (Undoing) Racial Logics in the Age of Drone Warfare (original) (raw)
2018, With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims, and US Empire (eds. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana), University of Minnesota Press
This chapter examines the contemporary expansion of drone strikes and extra-judicial “targeted killings” in the context of US global counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns. My principal goal is to illuminate the differential “disposition matrix” of misery produced by the state and to interrogate the questions conjured by this violence for coalitional politics in the drone age. The chapter unfolds in three parts. The first section offers a primer on the geopolitical and racial logics of drone wars as the latest installment in a long history of US military presence in the Middle East and South Asia. The second section seeks to intervene into emergent drone criticism by prioritizing an account of the destabilizing effects of these militarized technologies on social relations for civilians living under the constant threat of aerial bombardment. Finally, the chapter concludes that the durability of the drone forces us to contend with and challenge the ethical common sense of Washington on the conduct of war and the grammar used to make sense of US state violence. I assert that drones are not exceptional but endemic to racial domination and capitalist exploitation at the heart of US empire. Their expanded deployment both at home and abroad should be of central concern to activists and scholars of race, war, and empire. Keywords: Comparative racialization, counterterrorism, double-tap strikes, disposition matrix, drone wars, Af-Pak, imperial violence, US homeland security state, social relations, jirga, coalition
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