Techno-legal geographies: consumer drone misuse and harms

Drones increasingly feature beyond battlefields, deployed across civil, commercial and hobbyist applications and contexts. So too are off-the-shelf consumer drones increasingly being misused. From their outfitting with improvised weapons to the deployment of drones to harass individuals, both incidents involving consumer drones and the (potential) harms accompanying them, have diversified. Interested in emerging techno-legal geographies of consumer drone misuse, this paper deploys a feminist analytic to interrogate drone-enabled harms. It brings drone geographies into dialogue with feminist legal and digital geographies, to interrogate the drone as a technology encountered and interpreted in legal terms and accompanied by gendered impacts. Responding to calls for the expansion of the methodological toolkit underpinning the drone’s study while also affording geolegal attention to the drone, the paper draws upon focus groups designed in collaboration by a geographer and barrister and bringing together lawyers across diverse specialisms in an exploration of drone misuse and harm. Through analysis of examples of drone misuse and the legal process accompanying its investigation, we underscore both that drones can introduce novel as well as extend existing technology-enabled harms, and that such harms exceed the confines of aviation law, cutting across multiple areas of law. Collectively, we argue that employing a feminist approach in the drone’s critical analysis acts to foreground diversified drone harms and their uneven impacts.