Distributed Empire: A Technics of Drone War

Abstract Beginning with a material and conceptual entry from the global South, this article theorizes drone warfare as an instance of what the author terms distributed empire. The US imperial formation has generally been reticent to establish formal colonies even as it projects power. This political logic has found sociotechnical form in its key technology—the weaponized drone. Media and US publics today are awash in techno-fetishist propaganda that touts the US ability to conduct “remote” war and “over-the-horizon” warfare. In this context, distributed empire is a relational account that draws attention to the assemblages that constitute weaponized drones and foregrounds the situatedness of drones within specific geopolitical and sociotechnical environments. Attending to distributed empire yields a decolonizing orientation toward the study of the drone war, one that decenters a global North–centric account of such violence and attends to the rest of us—the majority world—as entangled agents in our own right.