Imagining people, targeting phones

This article engages with the mobile phone as a locus of military practice and resistance by examining the use of mobile phones as tactical targets in war. Our analysis adds to the International Relations (IR) and security studies literature that has investigated the mobile phone by mobilising Paul Virilio’s thinking around prosthetic technologies and obedient resistance. In this way, we offer an account of how the mobile phone enables political domination and violence, while at the same time affording creative modes of resistance. To illustrate our theorisation of the mobile phone at war, we turn to three empirical examples from the post-9/11 US drone strikes, the post-2022 war in Ukraine, and Israel’s walkie-talkie and pager attacks in Lebanon in 2024. They show how tactical targeting operates through the ontological collapsing of human and device and how the relative ‘smartness’ of the device influences levels of human/technology integration and the kind of political violence that the phone makes possible. Moreover, the illustrations demonstrate how obedient resistance may occur through three related strategies, all of which seek to partly reverse the integration of human and device: decoupling, encrypting, and unsmarting.