Introduction

This book examines drone warfare – primarily understood now as an issue of technology, military strategy, and law – through popular cultural forms: fiction, film, drama, theater, art, performance, and dance.

Drawing on theoretical work from the fields of culture and human rights, and examining existing critiques of drones, this volume demonstrates how powerful – predominantly western – states engage in a double violence when they deploy a remotely controlled weapon, one which both kills the victim and dehumanizes them as a threat, a terrorist, or a racialized other.

Through close readings and analysis of cultural representations of drones, and situating them in their political and historical contexts, the essays make transparent the vocabulary of human rights work, and spotlight critical questions, contradictions and political agendas which surround the remotely controlled technologies of violence.