ABSTRACT
This article on drone strikes in Pakistan offers a distinctive empirical case study for critical scholarship of counterterrorism. By asking how cosmopolitanism has developed through UK news discourse, it also provides a constructivist contribution to the literature on drones. I argue that UK news discourse is not cosmopolitan because it focuses on risk and places the Other beyond comprehension. US–UK networked counterterrorism operations have complicated accountability, and while a drive for certainty promoted more scrutiny of policy, news media outlets, academics and activists turned to statistical and visual genres of communication that have inhibited understanding of the Other.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mark Pope
Mark Pope completed his doctoral thesis on risk-based cosmopolitanism at Royal Holloway University of London in March 2015. He is currently working as a visiting lecturer at St Mary’s University in Twickenham and as a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London.