Drone Empires

Abstract In 2020, Azerbaijan's army forcibly reincorporated most of the majority-Armenian breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Drones sped up the tempo, and commenters credited them as the “magic bullet” that delivered a swift victory. The drones dominated Karabakh's airspace as well as its airtime. Peeling away the techno-spectacle reveals how drones too form overlapping alliances and actor-networks. Connecting drones with pipelines, airplanes, oil, and officials in Tel Aviv, Baku, and Washington, DC, complicates the ethnic conflict narrative by showing how the United States and its regional collaborator, Israel, were at least as consequential in this conflict as Azerbaijan's Turkish “ethnic brethren.” Another alliance—with operators, artificial intelligence, and advanced munitions—demonstrates how drones, much like their human collaborators, arrived in Karabakh with experiences from elsewhere across Asia and Africa. Human and machine then applied their experiences and data from Karabakh to places like Ukraine and Gaza. Locating Karabakh within these developments on the human-machine learning curve shows how drones did more than help Azerbaijani forces displace Armenian communities from the place they call Artsakh; they also continue to displace human fingers from the triggers of increasingly autonomous weapons.