Introduction

In October 2013, Rafiq ur Rehman and two of his children, Zubair and Nabila, traveled from North Waziristan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, to Washington. They were invited to give a witness account to the United States Congress, recalling their experience of a drone attack. On the day of the attack, on October 24, 2012, Rafiq's mother, Mamana Bibi, gathered okra with her grandchildren Zubair and Nabila. Mamana was killed and both children were injured (Amnesty International, 2013). The meeting in Washington was attended by just five members of Congress. Rafiq's family lawyer was denied a visa for the United States and could not accompany the family on their journey (McVeigh, 2013). The experience of ‘living under drones’ (Stanford Clinic and NYU Clinic, 2012), which Rafiq and his family were subjected to, exemplifies the entanglement of the geopolitics of the war on terror with drone technology and drone strikes, and with a dispensation of justice that proceeds via a ‘scopic regime’, which identifies drone victims as terrorist targets, and thus as killable.

Drones fascinate. They offer a visual spectacle, a ‘drone-o-rama’ (Kaplan, 2017) of seemingly untouchable power that has captured the public imagination through movies such as Enemy of the State (Scott, 1998) and Eye in the Sky (Hood, 2015). Although drones tend to be associated with military deployments in the battle spaces of the Middle East, studying them exclusively through the lens of a military ‘Gorgon stare’ (Holland Michel, 2019), as the material embodiment of the all-seeing and lethal eye of a military object, misses the wideranging and versatile usage and effects of drone technology, which, as I demonstrate in this chapter, ranges from the kill capacity that works through a database of terrorist suspects—the disposition matrix—(Gettinger, 2015), to the biopolitical management of life during the COVID pandemic. My point of departure is Derek Gregory's (2014) call that we should not be unduly preoccupied with a technical object but attend instead to a wider ‘matrix of military violence’ generated by the drone. As I argue, this attention must extend to the militarized practices of surveillance and governmentality that seep into the realm of domestic life.

This chapter presents drones as a central element in the contemporary techno-political assemblage of global violence, which proceeds via killing, surveillance and the formation and government of conduct.