Across the Battlelines: Drones, Social Video and Mediatized Armed Conflict

This article explores how the proliferation of small affordable drones is transforming mediatized war and armed conflict. Specifically, it examines how the footage captured by drones deployed in both surveillance and combat roles is used as propaganda via social video––deterritorializing and reterritorializing conflict by crossing and mediatizing established battlelines, and in its circulation, reconfiguring global networked affect and the operations of opposing forces and their allies. Several cases are examined, including symmetric battlefield conflicts between modern armies in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict and the Russo-Ukrainian War, as well as Hamas and allied Palestinian groups’ asymmetric insurgency against Israeli forces in Gaza. Beyond the corporeal and material impacts of the drones, the footage’s circulation, and the subsequent multi-platform interactive mediation of the phenomena of contemporary drone warfare illustrate the role that these technologies are playing in the weaponization of our new interactive archive, implicating all distant viewers in this new modality of mediatized violence.