Elke Schwarz - Death machines

Death machines

The ethics of violent technologies

Elke Schwarz

Manchester University Press

Copyright Elke Schwarz 2018

The right of Elke Schwarz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN9781526114822hardback

First published 2018

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This book is dedicated to Edith & Harry

This book is the result of several years work and a great many people and places have helped shape it. The project began during my doctoral studies at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I was embedded in an intellectually rich and challenging environment. Many lively discussions, on campus and off, have influenced my thoughts on ethics, violence, and technology.

I am extremely fortunate to have had an exceptional supervisor whose ability as an intellectual guide, an outstanding scholar and a compassionate human being was instrumental to this book, so I want to begin by sincerely thanking Kimberly Hutchings for her unwavering guidance and mentorship. I am thankful also to Chris Brown, Patrick Hayden and Mervyn Frost, who have each provided great support and encouragement at different stages of the project.

For spirited debate, the honing of ideas and of course friendship, I am thankful to Mikey Bloomfield, Diego de Merich, Myriam Fotou, Kathryn Fisher, Joe Hoover, Marta Iiguez de Heredia, Mark Kersten, Paul Kirby, Sebastian Lexer, Meera Sabaratnam, Laust Schouenborg and Nick Srnicek. I would also like to thank Andrew Futter and my other colleagues and friends at University of Leicester's HyPIR for providing such an encouraging and enabling environment in which to complete this work.

And then there are my colleagues, fellow travellers, and co-conspirators further afield. There is no way the book would be what it is today were it not for stimulating interlocutors at various workshops and conferences, many of whom inspired a thought or two that you might find in this book, specifically Wim Zwijnenburg, Peter Asaro, Heather Roff, John Emery and Caroline Holmqvist. I also would like to thank the editors at Manchester University Press, particularly John Banks for his meticulous copy-editing work, and the reviewers of the manuscript for their helpful comments.

I have also been fortunate enough to count on an astonishing support network closer to home. Specifically, I would like to thank all of the Sammans for their extraordinary generosity and magnificent writing retreat. My deepest gratitude is owed to my wonderful family for their unconditional support and inexhaustible optimism, and to Amin Samman, who, with his unfailing encouragement, his keen intellect and sharp eye, has been nothing short of spectacular.

This book is motivated by the perplexities of our contemporary wars, in which new practices and technologies of violence are presented as a more ethical and superior way of killing. This turn to argue for a more ethical way of killing in war is emphasised in debates on the use of lethal drones and the development of new autonomous weapons systems. The previous US administration under Barack Obama went to great lengths to characterise the use of lethal Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) more commonly known as drones as ethical, lawful and prudent instruments in countering terrorism. Similarly, proponents of autonomous military robotics in the US Department of Defense (DoD) and elsewhere argue that the use of Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) or killer robots could make warfare in general more ethical and humane than in previous periods of human history. The emergence of ostensibly moral technologies of violence presents a challenge to mainstream conceptions of ethics in International Relations and International Political Theory. Current frameworks of just war traditions, ethics of war or international law, for example, all struggle to grasp, let alone challenge, the ethical implications of lethal drone strikes and the drive to establish killer robot armies. And where scholarly debates over the ethics of such weapons do take place, they are often confined to discussions of legality and effectiveness, ending up mired in problematic equations of fact with value. This impasse, along with the military discourse that surrounds lethal technologies, raises important questions about what is at work in the relationship between such technologies, their uses and the ethical justifications given for practices of political violence. In particular, what enables the framing of an instrument for surveillance and killing as an inherently ethical instrument? What kind of sociopolitical rationale underpins such a framing? And how does this rationale itself engender new regimes of high-tech killing? Death Machines addresses these questions by offering an analysis of how the production of techno-biopolitical subjectivities undergirds contemporary forms of technologised warfare.

In order to do this, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, who had an astute grasp of the biopolitical and scientific-technological implications of the modern human condition. To date, a range of scholars have drawn on Arendt for analyses of biopolitical dimensions of violence. However, a systematic account of her work on biopolitical trajectories and technologies remains underdeveloped in current scholarship. In the first part of this text, I establish such an account and I argue that the Arendtian analysis draws out a duality at work in the biopolitical shaping of subjectivities the politicisation and technologisation of life itself on one hand, and the emergence of biological imageries that inform metaphors and processes of politics on the other. This helps us better understand how contemporary ethical frames of political violence are produced and shaped. The second part of the book is then concerned with the possibility of ethical thinking in a biopolitical present that is mediated heavily through technological interfaces and networks, specifically in modern warfare. My focus is on how modern subjectivities are produced through technological and biopolitical mandates, how such subjectivities shape contemporary understandings of politics and violence, and how these understandings, in turn, foster a type of ethics that supports increasingly technologised modes of political violence. In this way, my concern is to uncover how mechanisms of contemporary politics not only turn life and death into a technical matter but also impose limits on the way we conceive of and are able to contest the ethics of contemporary warfare. In short, by building an Arendtian biopolitics framework to situate a critique of contemporary conceptions of ethics of violence, this book offers two contributions: it supplements existing accounts of biopolitics as political rationales and offers a new way to theorise and disrupt justifications for technology-driven processes of violence in present-day warfare, such as the increased use of lethal drone strikes and the advent of AWS in war.