Re-visioning the “Eye in the Sky”: targeted drone strikes and an ethics of the encounter

ABSTRACT

The complexities which beset any attempts to ascribe a foundational ethic to matters of a political stripe are well known, and continue to provoke fierce debate within studies of international relations, geopolitics and security studies. Unsurprisingly, these questions have taken on crucial import within the sub-field of critical terrorism studies (CTS), as authors grapple with the range of counter-terrorism, counter-radicalisation and counter-extremism practices enacted by the Western state as part of an ongoing ‘War on Terror.’ And while much of this scholarship has been invaluable in problematizing the concept of ‘terrorism’ per se, normative questions have proven somewhat more elusive. Through a reading of the film Eye in the Sky, along with its take on the controversial counter-terrorism practice of targeted drone assassinations, this article reiterates the case for an ethical approach which takes radical difference as the basis for any engagement with the Other. Moreover, and following international relations authors of a poststructuralist lineage, it will be argued that supplementing Levinasian ethics with Derridean deconstruction can open up new and useful ways of approaching such seemingly intractable ethical conundrums.

KEYWORDS:

• terrorism
• counter-terrorism
• drones
• ethics
• film

Acknowledgments

I would live to give thanks to both anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments received. A special thanks I reserve for Alice Martini and all of her hard work in coordinating and pulling this edition together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Emancipation” has notably been conceptualised in “broad” terms (Jackson et al. 2017). This has not, however, prevented any disagreements surrounding its usage, as can be seen in a recent discussion between Jackson and Toros (2016b) over the fruitfulness of engaging with state officials. For the former, “counterterrorism is today the direct antithesis of emancipation,” but for Toros ‘there is no contradiction in the “commitment to emancipation” because dialogue with state actors remains “an important avenue for praxis and resistance by CTS scholars” (Toros 2016b, 129).

2. A case in point would be the Western military intervention in Libya: by framing the ongoing conflict in terms of “human rights,” the US, UK and French governments would become entangled in the increasingly dubious foreign policy of toppling the Libyan government. Once the “human rights” discourse is evoked by Western governments, a determinate set of policy responses are enabled while others are disabled. And yet the forcible removal of Muammar Gaddafi would, if anything, result in the exacerbation of the violence and divisions in the country, along with the strengthening and entrenchment of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Daesh.

3. This is not to suggest, it is worth making clear, that all humanitarian proclamations are cloaking some kind of subterfuge, that all attempts to establish a normative foundation from which to take action is doomed to failure, nor that all counter-terrorism operations carried out by the Western state are without any ethical legitimacy. Furthermore, the resort to superficial, caricatured and moralistic tendencies are evidenced in the discourse of the Western state security apparatus as much as the violent non-state groups they are at loggerheads with.

4. It should be noted that Strawser has distanced himself from actual US policy and practice in utilizing drones, such as targeted strikes for instance.

5. Closely related to this, any ethical objection levelled against drones in terms of asymmetrical warfare also becomes a moot point since seemingly what is of importance is whether or not the cause is justified, and not necessarily the means through which they are carried out.

6. Derek Gregory has criticised Chamayou for his tendency to reduce drones to just one of their uses: targeted drone strikes. This should be avoided so as not to discount the myriad ways in which they are operationalized, and the particular networks and assemblages they become nodes of.

7. For an overview of Levinas’s problematic transversal of the ethical and political see Critchley (2004).