Life in the Age of Drone Warfare

“As the presence of the drone in public imaginaries expands, its military/imperial paternities are overshadowed while the modes of violence that drone operations enable are progressively normalized. This thoughtfully curated collection definitively interrupts those trajectories. Putting the drone in its geopolitical place, it traces drone genealogies through histories of surveillance and killing from above, to the colonial presents in which we are all implicated, and that we need now more than ever to stand against.” - Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, UK

“Life in the Age of Drone Warfare is an intoxicating whirlwind of a volume explicating the drone in history, law, culture, and geopolitics. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan steer the way through an incisive feminist and critical lens partnered with startling material evidence. We find the drone coiled within matrices of relations, both distant and intimate, calculative, legal and bureaucratic, yet embodied and affective. Twisted in not only a vertical but vortical kind of power, the drone winds, distorts, corkscrews, and strangles—rewriting worlds as it goes.” - Peter Adey, author of Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects

"This truly interdisciplinary work will challenge conventional understandings of a quickly emerging academic area. Those seeking a purely empirical analysis of how drone technology has changed the landscape might be left seeking slightly more, but they will be exposed to a series of well-constructed, timely arguments throughout this volume. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - W. Miller, Choice

"An extensive and thorough compendium." - Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural

"A masterful document, as fraught and anxiety-inducing as its topic is, the book is, as they say, required reading. . . . I am eager to read more from any one of the authors included in it." - Matthew Chambers, New Americanist

"A comprehensive feminist and critical intervention. . . . A decisive feminist and anti-racist contribution to security and surveillance studies that provides a diverse range of interdisciplinary lenses." - Abigail Curlew, Surveillance & Society

"The collection of essays in Life in the Age of Drone Warfare offers a nice corrective to the over-proliferation of studies and artistic practices using drones in contemporary media studies . . . Taken together, the pieces map a fairly comprehensive landscape of the discourse and lived realities around the drone war, in particular the militarization of consumption across the racialized divides of the Global North and the Global South." - Patrick Brodie, Synoptique

"Life in the Age of Drone Warfare is an eclectic collection of fascinating articles. . . .Together, these voices show that while we don’t yet know everything we need to about military drones, we do know they are over-determined." - Chris Hables Gray, Technology and Culture

"Both appealing and relevant to a large audience and offers an exemplary model for continued interdisciplinary research within the critical humanities. . . . The contributions to this book are exemplary of well-researched, critical, and interdisciplinary work in the humanities." - Hugo Ljungbäck, International Journal of Communication

"Life in the Age of Drone Warfare stands apart from most of the other books on lethal drones through its focus on perceptual and imaginative constructions of spatial, normative and biopolitical realities." - Emil Archambault, International Affairs

"An expansive approach to drones and contemporary warfare" - Isla Forsyth, Social & Cultural Geography

"This book is in an exciting and innovative collection that promotes a critical reading of drones and does much to break down the static and realist assumptions that frequently inform this issue." - Michelle Bentley, Politics, Religion & Ideology