Drones and imagination: A response to Paul Kahn

European Journal of International Law

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 227-233

  Moyn, Samuel ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84877146906     PISSN: 09385428     EISSN: 14643596     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ejil/cht011     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Kahn, Imagining Warfare, this issue, at 199
2. Kahn, Reason and Will in the Origins of American Constitutionalism, 98 Yale LJ (1989) 449
3. P.W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (2011). Cf. D. Bates, States of War
4. Enlightenment Origins of the Political (2011), for a historically more careful but otherwise similar narrative that connects the construction of domestic rights regimes to the emancipation of the political and the construction of external sovereignty in the early modern period, albeit explicitly theorized only in the 18th century
5. See P.W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (2003).
6. Kahn, Criminal and Enemy in the Political Imagination, 99 Yale Rev (2011) 148
7. P.W. Kahn, Finding Ourselves at the Movies (forthcoming).
8. M. Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000).
9. Kahn, The Paradox of Riskless Warfare, 22 Philosophy and Public Policy Q, (2002) 2
10. Miller, Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing,Washington Post, 27 Dec. 2011.
11. The parallel might lead one to question how individualized targeted killing today really is. Like colonial governance, it follows a logic fundamentally different from domestic criminal law outside matters of conspiracy, in which individuals are targeted for their membership or leadership of a corporate enemy.
12. D. Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (1981), especially Pts 1 and 2 on gunboats and guns respectively
13. more vividly see S. Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Mans Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (trans. Joan Tate, 2007).
14. Consider, as exceptions that prove the rule, the interesting cases dredged up by historians of the rare instances in which Europeans were beaten in the age of empire: T. Andrade, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Chinas First Great Victory over the West (2011) and R. Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (2011).
15. See, e.g., N. Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (2003) and R. W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (2005).
16. See above all O.A. Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (2005).
17. For the CIA see T. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007).
18. See Feichtinger and Malinowski, Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism, 3 Humanity (2012) 35
19. For two very different approaches to the rise of legalism in war compare J.L. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (2007) and my From Antiwar Politics to Antitorture Politics, in L. Douglas and A. Sarat (eds), Law and War (forthcoming, 2013).
20. Put another way, the need for the guidance the International Committee of the Red Cross recently offered on what counts as direct participation in hostilities by civilians was not precipitated by drones
21. N. Melzer, Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities under International Humanitarian Law (2009).
22. The trope that drones are no longer science fiction is the central one of journalistic accounts about them, though I have not found any academic comment about how unmanned war has been imagined in socalled military science fiction over time. While the US government only recently acknowledged its drone programme, the Air Force searches for recruits by advertising its role in bringing about a world in which the drone isnt science fiction but what we do every day.
23. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiB3vrhPDNs (consulted 28 Dec. 2011).
24. See, e.g., Villasenor, The Drone Threat to National Security, Scientific American, 11 Nov. 2011.
25. See especially P.W. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (2000), with its insistence that the problem today is not too much distance from judicial guidance or policy formulation but too little.
26. See, e.g., D. Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (2008).
27. R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (2008).