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| 1 |
ID:
054689
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| 2 |
ID:
143311
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| Summary/Abstract |
As military technologies progress at a pace that challenges human cognitive and reasoning capacities, it is becoming ever more difficult to appraise the ethics of their use. In this article, I argue that the contours of ethical killing are shaped and constrained by a medical discourse that has its basis in a deeper regime of techno-biopolitical expertise. Narratives and representations of drones as surgical, ethical and wise instruments for counter-terrorism activities rely not only on the rendering neutral of both technology and practice, but also on a conflation of technology with practice as a biopolitical necessity. In this conflation, I argue, the practice of targeted killing is adiaphorized. Images and metaphors of the body politic turn drone-strikes into a form of medicine that experts prescribe as a means of treating or preventing political cancers, diseases and illnesses. Ethics, in turn, is treated as a primarily technical matter – something to be technologically clarified and administered from an expert space beyond the zone of ethical contestation. As long as this is the case, ethics will remain but a cog in our new killing machines.
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| 3 |
ID:
052970
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| Publication |
July-Sep 2004.
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| Summary/Abstract |
War is a multi-faceted phenomenon. Against the trend of conceptualising war from a technological perspective, a historically sensitive strategic perspective on war is suggested, relying on Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm. The analytical utility of this framework on war is strengthened by investigating its historical relevance, as well as by applying it to the evaluation of the post-Cold War conceptualizations of war. In the latter context, the influence of six essential factors on contemporary definitions of war is established. Accordingly, the "nature" of contemporary war is conceptualized via the process of reproducing and transforming the Cold War-era understandings of war.
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